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BMEAU of EDUCATI/ ^rpjjjjj 





The Teaching of 
History and 
Other Papers 



Sherratt & Hughes 

Publishers to the Victoria University of Manchester 

Manchester: 27 St Ann Street 

London : 65 Long Acre 



Is 



3 DEC i 8 
Copy ^1958 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/teachingofhistorOOwith 




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The Teaching of 
History and 
Other Papers 






H. L. WITHERS 

irah Fielden Professor of II... 

^ in Owens College, Manchester. 



C\ Late Sarah Fielden Professor of Education 



Edited with Biographical 
Introduction a?td a 
Selection from his Letters 



BY 

J. H. FOWLER 

Clifton College. 



MANCHESTER 

At the University Press 

1904 



55.^ 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



It has seemed to some of the friends of the late 
Professor H. L. Withers, that they might honour 
the memory, and extend the usefulness, of a life that, 
measured by years, was all too short, if they put 
together some of his writings on subjects that lay 
near to his heart, together with such extracts from his 
letters and such a brief biographical sketch as might 
suffice to recall to those who knew him a personality 
of wonderful charm, and give to others at least some 
faint impression of what he was. 

The Editor owes, and hereby tenders, his best 
thanks to those who have aided him either by direct 
contributions to the Memoir or by the loan of letters 
and permission to make extracts ; to Mr. Hartley 
Withers, without whose sympathy and assistance the 
volume could hardly have been undertaken ; to Mr. 
P. A. Barnett and Messrs. Longmans for permission 
to reprint the paper on " Ancient History Teaching " 
from " Teaching and Organisation " ; to the Syndics 
of the Cambridge University Press and the late 
London School Board for a similar permission in the 
case of the two papers that follow ; to the editors and 
proprietors of tbe Contemporary Review and Child 
Life for the use of the papers on " New Authorities in 
English Education " and " Work and Play " respec- 
tively ; and to Miss Williams, of the Franco-English 
Guild, for the summary of the lecture on Bacon. 



CONTENTS, 



PAGE 

Preface ... ... ... ... ... y. 

I. Memoir ... ... ... ... _, 1 

Childhood, 1 — Schooldays, 2 — Oxford, 
8 — Fh'st Experiences in Teaching, 15 — 
Manchester Grammar School, 1 7 — Clifton 
College, 21 — Isleworth, 24 — Owens 
College, 32 — Illness and Death, 48 — 
Conclusion, 49. 

II. Letters ... ... ... ... 57 

III. Ancient History Teaching 103 

IV. Teaching of History in the Nineteenth 

Century ... ... ... ... 1 39 

V. Memorandum on the Teaching of 

History ... ... ... ,_ 165 

VI. The New Authorities in English 

Education ... ... ... ... 203 

VII. The Distinction Between Work and 

Play 235 

VIII. Bacon's Philosophy of Life ... ... 26I 

Index to Letters... ... ... ... 269 



M 



emoir 



MEMOIR. 

Harry Livingston Withers was born in 

Liverpool on Dec. ist, 1864. He was the 

third son of Mr. H. H. Withers 

CHILDHOOD. r o • r- c Tin--i i 

01 Spring Croft. Whilst he 
was still a child his parents removed to 
London, and he was sent to Kings College 
School. He was one of a large family ; and 
as his father and mother were both members 
of large families also, he was unusually rich 
in relations. He grew up with strong attach- 
ments to his kindred, and his boyish affection 
for so many relatives of various ages and 
tastes doubtless fostered the faculty for 
appreciating and liking almost everyone 
whom he met which was characteristic of his 
maturer life. Of his childish tastes the one 
chiefly remembered is a military ardour 
which lasted till he was thirteen or fourteen. 
He was never so happy as when he was 
given stories of battle or histories of war. 
His ambition altered later ; before he went 
to Oxford he seems to have looked forward 



2 MEMOIR 

to the career of a schoolmaster. But 
the interest of his childhood to a certain 
extent coloured the whole of his after- 
years. It is scarcely fanciful to trace it 
in that erect soldierly bearing which left a 
striking impression upon those who made his 
acquaintance in early manhood. It was 
unmlstakeable in his life-long attachment to 
the Volunteer service, In his study of military 
history, in the keenness with which he found 
time to follow all the details of the South 
African war ; and, finally, In his favourite 
habit of representing human life to himself 
and to his pupils under the figure of warfare. 
Of his life at Kino^'s Colleo^e School It Is 
fortunately possible to reconstruct some pic- 
ture from the impressions of 
SCHOOLDAYS. ... . -, f , ,. , 

two distmguished schooliel- 

lows. Mr. R. McKenna, M.P., writes as 
follows : — 

** Not many memories bear so fresh a 
stamp as the early impressions of an affec- 
tionate school friendship. In 1880 when I 
first became intimate with Harry Withers 



MEMOIR 3 

at King's College School he was already 
marked out as the most promising classical 
scholar we had : not yet at the top, but rising 
fast, and much younger than most of his 
competitors. I knew him well by reputation 
before we came together in the same class. 
He said good things which were quoted by 
other boys, very good we thought them, 
humorous and with a spice of impudence, 
and they ran the round of the school. He 
was a little fellow at that time, rather slight 
and delicate in body, but healthy in colour 
and always good-humoured and cheery. He 
had a habit of drollery not a bit in keeping 
with his strenuous work, and I remember 
with what surprise I discovered that the 
underlying tone of his mind was wholly 
serious. His work was his first thought. 
With a view to obtaining a scholarship at 
Balliol he made it his special aim to acquire 
literary facility, sparing no pains to develop 
his considerable natural gifts of expression. 
For example, in conjunction with one of his 
schoolfellows, he set himself the task of 



4 MEMOIR 

writing a weekly essay on some selected 
topic; each treated the subject independently, 
and at the end of the week essays were 
exchanged for the purpose of criticism. Yet 
his work bore none of the marks of laborious 
effort ; he had originality, he worked easily, 
and he found genuine pleasure in his daily 
task. Very noticeable in him was the 
absence of ambition in the ordinary sense . 
when we talked of the future he never 
expressed any other wish than to learn and 
to teach. After leaving school we saw each 
other but rarely — our occupations have kept 
us apart — but when from time to time we 
met and talked of the past and the present 
I used to feel how thoroughly he had realised 
the purpose which he had put before himself 
in boyhood." 

Mr. H. W. Blunt, Fellow of Christ Church, 
who was his contemporary at school and at 
Oxford, writes : — 

'' I was with H. L. Withers at King's in 
Middle Third and again in Sixth Form 
Room. In the former as in the latter he 



MEMOIR 5 

was nearly youngest. As a little boy he 
was not, I think, particularly industrious, rely- 
ing too much on the possession of a quick 
brain. He was of a sunny temperament, 
and a high temper. A bit of a chatterbox. 
Popular in a rag or a discussion alike, though 
not athletic and somewhat shy. Later he 
was a hard worker, his eyes showing tired 
and strained. A good raconteur but with 
flashes of silence. The wit rather than the 
humourist of his circle — a post usurped by 
his friend R. McKenna. He was somewhat 
reserved except among his intimates, and 
these were mostly the butterflies rather than 
the ants and bees of the sixth. He was in 
search of a style when he came into the 
sixth, and the results were curious at first, 
but the motto ' Let the galled jade wince ' 
came more and more to be noted and feared. 
His first successes were in French — where 
he was for some three years easily first. He 
acted in the Bourgeois Gentilhomine at Xmas 
'79, while his first appearance in Greek Play 
was in the Frogs in '80 in the somewhat 



6 MEMOIR 

humble part of Euripides. As early as '80 
a discerning examiner had picked him out 
while still in the Under Sixth as the best 
Latin versifier among the pack of us — and 
he did not go up to Balliol, if my memory 
serves me, till %^. It was rather a surprise 
to us that he did not take more of the 
University prizes. But I think that his high 
strung temperament is one that always goes 
with a certain delicacy of health. Not that 
he was not sound enough, but he took a 
great deal out of himself then and always. 
As to the mark he made in the life of the 
place, he was not an athlete, his work was a 
thing he seldom talked about, and he was at 
all times by preference a laughing philoso- 
pher. But his friends swore by him. He 
was not puritanical, and his winged words 
could be picturesque enough. But they were 
most unstinted at mean things. He had 
then, as after, everyone's trust. He wore 
* the white flower of a blameless life.' Alas ! 
that 'whom the gods love die young.'" 

Professor J. W. Hales, of King's College, 



MEMOIR 7 

took the Sixth Form of King's College 
School in English literature and essays. To 
these lessons Withers looked back with a 
special pleasure and gratitude. *' Writing 
essays for you," he told Professor Hales in 
a letter in 1887, ''and listening to your 
criticisms on the matter and manner of them 
did more, I think, for my education than 
anything else." This seems to be the only 
direct testimony to the influences of his 
school-days that remains on record ; but those 
who heard his Inaugural Lecture at Owens 
College will remember some words of its 
concluding passage that may appropriately 
be quoted here : " When we look back at 
our own school-days we remember that what 
really signified to us and quickened us was 
some touch of genius, some stroke of wit, 
some proof of sympathy, some evidence of 
genuine passion for what is great in literature 
or science, or maybe some personal oddity 
or quaintness in a forcible character." Pro- 
fessor Hales, on his part, has recorded his 
impressions of Withers : — 



8 MEMOIR 

"He was one of the most brilliant pupils I 
ever had, and some highly distinguished 
scholars have passed through the Sixth Form 
at King's College School, London ; as the 
Rev. Dr. Gow, now Headmaster of West- 
minster, the Rev. Professor Chase, D.D., 
President of Queen's College, Cambridge, 
Mr. A. W. Pollard, of the British Museum, 
Mr. Sidney Low, the well-known publicist, 
and many others of equal or scarcely less 
note. Withers was both receptive and 
original in a remarkable degree. He was 
eagerly attentive always, but at the same 
time maintained his independence, and 
thought for himself, not acquiescing in any- 
thing simply because his teacher said it, or 
till he had carefully revolved it ; this critical 
attitude, however, never being in the least 
impertinent or disrespectful. He was an 
altogether delightful pupil." 

In November, 1882, Withers was elected 

to an open classical scholarship at Balliol, 

and in October of the following- 

OXFORD. , . . . "^ 

year he went mto residence at 



MEMOIR 9 

Oxford. He took a first-class in Classical 
Moderations in 1884, and a first-class in 
Liter ae Humaniores in 1887. One of 
his closest friends at Balliol, Mr. George 
Macdonald, of Glasgow, has furnished the 
following account of his undergraduate 
career : — 

''When Withers first came up, it would 
not have been easy to predict where he was 
ultimately to find his closest friends. Apart 
from the prestige that naturally attached to 
him as a scholar, his qualities were such as 
would have made him popular in any circle. 
His knowledge of the world and his mastery 
of the art of good-natured repartee, enabled 
him to hold his own everywhere, while a 
quick and instinctive sympathy speedily put 
him on terms with those whom others found 
difficile or uninteresting. These charac- 
teristics were prominent throughout his 
undergraduate life. While his deepest 
intimacy was reserved for two or three, he 
was greatly liked by all, and up to the end 
he would often be met taking walks with 



10 MEMOIR 

men who, but for his companionship, would 
have been solitary. 

''The first year and a half witnessed no 
marked development. He was thoroughly 
happy in College life and companionship. 
But the work for Moderations was so well 
within his powers, that it never appealed to 
him as very serious. On the other hand, 
although he several times competed for the 
Hertford and the Ireland, he had not sufficient 
interest in ' pure scholarship ' to lead him to 
devote much time to its cultivation. He 
cared, indeed, a good deal for Latin poetry. 
But he had early acquired a love of English 
literature, and his knowledge of it was 
constantly deepening. Shakespeare had long- 
been a favourite, and now he read and 
re-read him with ever-increasino^ insiorht, 
carrying off almost as a matter of course 
the College Shakespeare prize. He read 
the lesser Elizabethans too, but they failed 
to stir him to enthusiasm. In novels, as in 
plays, his appreciation was intense rather 
than catholic. He certainly had no patience 



MEMOIR 11 

with second or third rate work. I have seen 
him take a novel he did not Hke, and thrust 
it bodily between the bars of the grate. 

*' So soon as he began to read for Greats, 
a notable change took place. The work 
proved deeply interesting, and it speedily 
absorbed almost all his intellectual energies. 
The picturesque and human elements in 
history attracted him, as they had always 
done. And in philosophy there was a great 
awakening:. His imas^ination was touched 
by the possibilities of metaphysical specula- 
tion. For awhile he seemed to be actually 
afraid that he would lose his hold of reality 
altogether. Jowett tried to administer comfort 
in the shape of the common-sense philosophy 
in which he had by that time come to believe 
profoundly. To Withers, however, in his 
then state of mind, this was simply unmeaning. 
He had perforce to struggle on until he 
reached firm ground for himself. His 
guide was Nettleship, the memory of whose 
teaching remained for him to the end a 
never-failing source of inspiration. Once a 



12 MEMOIR 

foothold had been gained on the speculative 
side, he was free to work out the ethical 
problems which so readily presented them- 
selves to one of his strong practical turn of 
mind. It was no surprise to his intimate 
friends when he decided to begin his teaching 
career in an elementary school. 

''As an undergraduate, he took a healthy 
interest in games of all kinds. But he had 
not the physical aptitude necessary for very 
active participation. At tennis, which he 
played regularly in the summer term, he was 
handicapped by his shortness of sight. A 
good match, either at cricket or at football, 
he would watch with keen enjoyment. He 
was fond too of the river. But it was 
perhaps In long walks that he took most 
real pleasure. Practically every fine Sunday 
in term time he would start early with one 
friend or with two, and spend all day in the 
country, returning to his rooms only In the 
late afternoon or early evening. On these 
occasions, at least in his later years at Oxford, 
the talk turned chiefly on one or other of the 



MEMOIR 13 

many philosophical questions In which he was 
interested. Political matters were sometimes 
discussed also. In those days he was an 
ardent Liberal, often speaking on that side in 
the Brakenbury Debating Society, of which 
he was in due course president. As a 
speaker, he was hampered somewhat by 
nervousness. But in reply he was always 
effective, and often extremely amusing. So 
far as I recollect, he never took part in a 
Union debate, and hardly ever even attended 
one : to public speaking, for its own sake, he 
attached little importance. 

" This statement of facts as they present 
themselves to recollection, seems sadly 
meagre and inadequate, It fails altogether 
to convey any idea of that in which the chief 
strength of his character lay — the happy 
combination of the ^eoiprjTLKos and the TrpaKTCKos.^ 
And it has taken no account of the singular 
charm of his personality — his genuineness, 
his wit, his quaint humour. All of these 
were as conspicuous in his undergraduate 

1. ' Philosopher' and ' practical man.' — Ed. 



14 MEMOIR 

days as In after life. The spiritual earnest- 
ness that his most intimate friends were 
privileged to see, was there too. Lastly, 
there was an element which naturally had 
freer play there than was possible afterwards 
— the high spirits that sometimes broke out 
when he felt thoroughly well, or was conscious 
of the sheer joy of living. This was generally 
when he was in closest contact with Nature, 
which he loved so well, — away in the open 
country, or most of all, perhaps, when 
tumbling in the waters of a lake or of 
the sea." 

Withers' reverence and affection in later 
years for R. L. Nettleship, as the Oxford 
tutor to whom he owed most, may be 
gathered from the two striking extracts from 
letters printed below in his correspondence 
(Nos. III., IV.), Few of his friends will 
read them without feeling that in describing 
his master the disciple unconsciously des- 
cribed himself. There must have been a strong 
affinity of spirit between the two men, how- 
ever much of the likeness we attribute to the 



MEMOIR 15 

direct influence of the older upon the younger. 
To another of the Ballloldons, W. H. Forbes, 
he also became strongly attached, and the 
friendship lasted through life. 

In the summer of 1887 he took a holiday 
tutorship in the house of a Harrow sixth- 
form boy, and then returned 
FIRST ^ r 1 

EXPERIENCES to Oxford to teach in an 

IN TEACHING, elementary school. He was 
influenced, partly, it would seem, by the 
desire to study the problems of education 
experimentally from the beginning, and partly 
from the strong democratic sympathy which 
all his life impelled him, though no one ever 
made less profession of it, to work for the 
less fortunate masses rather than for the 
well-to-do. The course he took was, for an 
University man, more daring and original 
than it would be at the present day. It is 
quite possible that he and his friend F. S. 
Marvin, now H.M. Inspector of Schools, 
were the two first University men of distinc- 
tion in England to become elementary school- 
masters. It was characteristic of him, too, 



16 MEMOIR 

that, in spite of his attachment to the Church 
of England, in which he had been brought 
up, he went to teach in a Wesleyan school. 
Of the headmaster of this school, Mr. 
Richardson, he always spoke with respect 
and affection. To this time belongs one of 
the too fragmentary note-books that survive 
among his papers. It was to be called 
*' Sparks from the Anvil," and his intention 
was to record in it the humours that diversify 
and enliven the routine-life of an elementary 
school. One brief entry may be quoted. 
The inspector had asked a question about 
"the use of the globes." One urchin alone 
held up a responsive hand. Receiving 
encouragement, he answered with the mono- 
syllable, " Gas." 

After half-a-year of this work Withers 
accepted a temporary mastership at the City 
of London School, where his character and 
ability profoundly impressed Dr. Abbott, 
then drawing to the close of his long head- 
mastership. From Dr. Abbott, too, he 
learnt a good deal, finding himself in close 



MEMOIR 17 

sympathy with that headmaster's studies in 
theology and English literature. 

In the summer of 1888 Dr. (then Mr.) 
Glazebrook became High Master of Man- 
chester Grammar School. One 

MANCHESTER 
GRAMMAR of his first acts was to offer 
SCHOOL. ^ p^g^ ^^ Withers, whose 

acquaintance he had made in the previous 
year. For what followed we have Dr. Glaze- 
brook's own testimony : — 

'' At first he had charge of a number of 
new boys, who, for various reasons, were not 
fit for any form. He taught them individually 
until they could be drafted off into regular 
classes. Here his experience in all-round 
teaching at an elementary school proved of 
great service. He took them in all subjects, 
and for almost the whole day, but without 
friction or boredom. Upon some of them he 
gained an influence which lasted through their 
school lives. After a short time he took a 
classical form, and acted as classical tutor to 
those sixth form boys who were specialising 
in science or mathematics. His form very 



18 MEMOIR 

soon became the most vigorous in the school, 
both in work and in play. It is hard to des- 
cribe the nature of his influence on them. He 
was no athlete, and his calm, slow manner 
lacked the superficial brightness which boys 
like. I think his power lay in extreme 
clearness, in force of character, and, above 
all, in sympathy. These elements made it a 
pleasure to hear him give a lesson, although 
there was nothing brilliant or striking in 
what he said. The sixth form " barbarians," 
for whom it was a new thing to do any 
literary work, were inclined at first to resent 
his demands upon them. But his quiet, 
kindly power very soon made them willing 
subjects." 

The imperfect physique and difficult 
conditions of life of many of the town-bred 
boys under his care troubled him, and he 
devoted much thought to the question of 
their healthy physical development. In his 
own classical fourth form he Introduced the 
practice of "five minutes' dumb-belling" in 
the middle of an hours' lesson, and he was 



MEMOIR 19 

satisfied that he obtained good results from it. 
In the Easter holidays he used to join a 
colleague in taking away a small party of 
Grammar School boys into the country — 
Derbyshire, the Lake District, the Isle of 
Man. On these expeditions, or on such 
flights into the country with colleagues as a 
short mid-term holiday permitted, he was at 
his best — the life of the party, full of merri- 
ment and good-fellowship, full of delight in 
Nature, yet revealing on occasion his deep 
interest in literature and philosophy, and his 
spiritual earnestness. It was a great privilege 
to be of his company then ; a still greater to 
be one of the friends who, in those years of 
growing seriousness, but as yet not of over- 
whelming stress, shared the long summer 
holiday with him in Norway or Switzerland. 
What such a holiday meant to him, how 
much of himself he gave at these times to 
his friends and to those who attracted him 
among the chance companions of travel, may 
be guessed from the lines he wrote in 
September, 1891, in imitation of Clough's 



20 MEMOIR 

''Amours de Voyage." They will be found 
below, among his letters. 

It is to these holidays that one's thoughts 
return most frequently as one tries to sum up 
one's impression of what he was, and what 
he achieved, in those four years of his life at 
Manchester. After all, his inestimable value 
to the school lay chiefly in the unconscious 
influence of a real personality. His geniality, 
humour, and good-comradeship won for him 
the affection of many of his colleagues ; the 
high ideals to which his own life was mani- 
festly loyal, uplifted all, boys and masters, 
who came under his spell. One special 
service which he rendered the Manchester 
School must not be passed over, even in 
this brief retrospect. He edited the school 
magazine Ulula for six months only, but in 
that short time he infused a new and vigorous 
life into it which fortunately outlasted his 
editorship. He saw that the Manchester 
Grammar School boy was open to literary 
influences, just as he had been in the days of 
De Quincey, to a degree very unusual in 



MEMOIR 21 

boys ; and he successfully used the magazine 
to foster that esprit de corps which is, of 
necessity, a somewhat difficult plant to rear 
in a large town day-school. His own con- 
tributions to Uhila included a delightful 
account of Manchester Grammar School, 
which he professed to have obtained through 
" Dr. Wasweissichnicht, of the University 
of Gottingen," from the report of an envoy 
despatched from Thibet to report on the 
chief schools of Great Britain. One of the 
inspirations of this article is the compound 
" demon-boil-and-scream-procession-waggon, " 
with the footnote of the Gottingen Professor 
that " this word, apparently a Thibetan para- 
phrase for 'train,' sounds better in German 
than in English." 

Dr. Glazebrook had been appointed Head- 
master of Clifton College in the winter of 
CLIFTON 1890, and he persuaded Withers 
to follow him there in September, 
1892. ''Part of his work," Dr. Glazebrook 
writes, "was to teach boys of nine and ten 
in our Preparatory School. This he did 



22 MEMOIR 

with great success, because he won their 
hearts by his kindness and their attention 
by his clear, slow exposition. At the same 
time he taught history to the classical sixth 
form. He very soon inspired them with 
great enthusiasm for the subject, largely, I 
think, by treating them as collaborators in 
discovery." He was also house-tutor in the 
School- House. The impression that Clifton 
made upon him, and the impression that he 
made upon Clifton, in the two short terms 
that he spent there, were both striking. ''In 
many respects," he wrote afterwards to a 
friend, "work there is in ideal surroundings. 
The Boys are, on the whole, I think, the 
best set of people I ever had anything to 
do with. The Masters are tremendously 
good fellows and devoted, body and soul, 
to the place." To the same friend he 
expressed his adm.iration of the best boys 
in the School-House, "strong and serious 
and quiet, and splendidly devoted to the 
House and School." His duties in the 
Preparatory School were the least to his 



MEMOIR 23 

taste. '' The little boys in the Preparatory," 
he wrote, "are nice little chaps for the most 
part, but I have not yet adjusted myself 
properly to teaching them, and they try my 
patience and temper very much." Greatly 
as he enjoyed the Clifton life, and intensely 
as he admired the spirit of the place, he did 
not altogether reconcile himself to the 
absorbing demands of a public school upon 
its masters. He had a fear that these 
demands made it difficult for a man to keep 
his own intellectual life vigorous. He would 
never have made the mistake of confining 
his own interests to the class-room, the house 
and the close. '' One helps boys more by 
living one's own life than by continually 
trying to live down to theirs," had been a 
saying of his Manchester days. Still, the 
conflict of duties — the immediate duty to 
the school, and the duty to oneself, which 
is indirectly a duty to others and even to 
one's pupils — was a real one to him. In 
any event, therefore, he would probably not 
have cared to remain a public-school master 



24 MEMOIR 

for more than a few years. His friends, at 
least, anticipated that after a period of proba- 
tion at Clifton he would succeed to the head- 
mastership of one of the great day-schools, 
and they took pleasure in the thought of 
what he might accomplish in such a posi- 
tion, by achievement and by example, for 
English middle-class education and the 
happiness and welfare of English middle- 
class boys. 

But he was destined to serve the cause of 
education in other and still wider ways. He 

had been scarcely two terms 
ISLEWORTH. ^^._ 11 1 

at Chiton when he was urged 
by Dr. Jowett and others who believed that 
he possessed the qualifications necessary for 
a peculiarly difficult post to stand for the 
Principalship of the Borough Road Training 
College for Elementary Teachers at Isle- 
worth. He visited the College, saw the 
committee, and was elected. On March 12, 
1893, he wrote from Clifton to the friend 
who had shared his experience of elementary 
teaching at Oxford: — "Would I might rise 



MEMOIR 25 

to the occasion and do the work as It ought 
to be done! .... You must now return to 
your long-abandoned correspondence with 
me, for we shall have a thousand Interests In 
common. Would I were worthier of the 
place ! " Such was the spirit in which he 
entered upon his ''six strenuous years" of 
service at Isleworth. His predecessor, 
Mr. P. A. Barnett, who had administered the 
college with conspicuous success, continued 
to reside in the neighbourhood ; and the 
relations between the two men were marked 
by a cordiality and Intimacy too seldom found 
under such circumstances. From the first 
Mr. Barnett was " guide, philosopher, and 
friend" to the new Principal, who was 
never weary of acknowledging his debt to 
Mr. Barnett's kindly wisdom. What Mr. Bar- 
nett, on his part, thought of his successor, 
and of his work at Isleworth, he shall tell us 
in his own words : — 

''Withers' association with the systematic 
training of teachers was very much a matter 
of accident, but whatever may have been the 



26 MEMOIR 

aSi/Aos atrta,! the progress of English educational 
science and practice has been very consider- 
ably influenced by it. 

*' He did more than any other man to bring 
the liberal University spirit into the business. 
There were men before him trained in 
English Universities who did good work 
in the preparation of teachers for their pro- 
fession ; but most of them had not enough 
real philosophy, perhaps also not enough 
courage, to shake themselves free from a 
rather paltry conception of educational 
science, and from narrow official traditions 
which made the colleges a sort of superior 
'seventh standard.' Withers was not only 
a student of Literse Humaniores ; he had 
also the excellent sense to see that nothing 
but a sound philosophy, a right way of looking 
at life, a real 'all-roundness,' could settle any 
of the vexed questions of practical education. 
And so far as he could work on the material 
provided for him, he tried to communicate 
this habit of mind to his pupils. 

1. ' Hidden cause.' — Ed. 



MEMOIR 27 

'' When the Headship of the Isleworth 
College was likely to become vacant, the 
retiring Principal sent particulars to Jowett 
and Lewis Nettleship, and asked for their 
help and suggestions as to a successor. 
They were aware of what had been already 
attempted, and were very warm friends of 
the endeavour to liberalise the curriculum 
and discipline of the primary training col- 
leges. Both of them suggested Withers as 
the right man for the post, and particulars 
were sent to him. When he came up from Clif- 
ton to make enquiries about it, we were much 
struck by his frankness and insight. H e gained 
immediate goodwill and confidence by asking 
the right questions ; he always did. 

"He took over a very difficult business. 
Only those who have tried to run a Training 
College for teachers in public elementary 
schools can know how exhausting it is. It is 
certain that his long six strenuous years at 
Isleworth shortened his life, making it harder 
for him to stand the strain of serious illness 
when it came. 



28 MEMOIR 

'•He changed nothing until he had given 
it a fair trial, and he changed nothing that he 
did not improve. He was as loyal to his 
predecessor as to everyone else. It is not 
easy to make clear to a lay public the signifi- 
cance of the details of his work. Only those 
who have had business in those ofreat waters 
know what it means to make '' notes of 
lessons " more intelligent, to give reality to 
"criticism lessons," to systematic school 
practice, and the careful supervision of 
teachers. He was no friend of the quacks 
who suppose that a teacher can be taught to 
give a lesson in the one and only right way 
to all and sundry pupils. To make a good 
teacher he knew that he had to educate the 
whole man. Nor did anyone ever hear him 
talk about " cultivating the faculties " — 
whether of observation or anything else. 
His conception of his task was to get his 
teachers to satisfy themselves clearly about 
the condition of their pupils' minds, and to 
guide their w^orking sympathetically to new 
enterprises and effort. 



MEMOIR 29 

'' In the administration of his college his 
merit and his defect was his trustfulness. 
Himself a right generous man, he made 
no preparation to deal with meanness : 
occasionally, therefore, he met meanness that 
dispirited him beyond understanding. Him- 
self the most loyal of souls, he was now and 
then left in the lurch by someone who should 
have died in a ditch for him and been proud 
of it. Believing other people to be better 
than himself, his shyness and reserve often 
lost him the warm affection which came freely 
to him from those who knew his truly lowly 
habit of thought. 

" He rarely spoke severely of anyone ; he 
would not talk of things he disliked. What 
he brooked least easily was the vulgarity of 
the self-seeking professional ' educationist ' of 
whatever 'grade.' There were some kinds 
of vulgarity that deprived him of words. 

'' What little remains of his printed work, 
good as it is, is nothing to the suggestiveness 
of his talk, whether on educational or other 
subjects. He often seemed to go straight to 



30 MEMOIR 

the root of things when other folk were 
bemused with somethings that somebodies 
had said about them. 

"All through his official life he declined 
the praise and prizes that should have been 
his, and distributed the leaves of his own 
proper wreath amongst his friends. To hear 
Withers talk, you might sometimes have 
thought that the only man who did nothing 
for education or his fellows was himself. 

'' Everyone that had dealings with him 
felt that here was a man. He failed to 
secure liking only where there was nothing 
to respond to his own fine qualities. He 
will be remembered as most great teachers 
are remembered, not so much by his written 
words, as by his personal teaching and spirit 
and example ; and when he is no longer vivus 
per ora, all grades of Education will be 
profiting by his good sense and his healthy 
belief in the systematic training of men and 
women for the work they have to do. He 
had not read his ' Republic ' for nothing." 

Of testimony to the fine quality and 



MEMOIR 31 

abiding influence of Withers' work at Isle- 
worth there has been no lack. It was indeed 
not the less valuable because he did not 
himself regard it as successful. The 'offences 
that must needs come,' he took to heart with 
that intense pain which was inevitable for 
a nature at once deeply sympathetic with 
human frailty, and passionately attached to 
high ideals. Again, he was absolutely sincere 
in word and deed : it was impossible for him 
to be guilty of the compromises which most 
men in positions of responsibility accept as 
the unavoidable sacrifice to their situation. 
Nor were his motives, though so singularly 
honest, always easily intelligible to those he 
ruled. His mind was 'philosophical' to a 
degree which the average man can scarcely 
comprehend. In the simplest decisions on 
the most ordinary questions he seemed to be 
always going back to 'first principles.' In 
this trait he was a true disciple of R. L. 
Nettleship, who had influenced him more 
profoundly than any other of his teachers. 
To himself, then, he seemed unsuccessful. 



32 MEMOIR 

'' I have not the kingly qualities," he said, 
with that touching modesty which confessed 
itself to his most intimate friends, and remains 
in their memory as one of his deepest and 
noblest characteristics. In no sense was his 
administration of Isleworth a failure ; but if 
it were, it must still have been one of those 
' high failures ' that ' overleap the bounds of 
low successes.' 

In the autumn of 1899 the Sarah Fielden 
Professorship of Education was founded at 
OWENS Owens College, Manchester, and 
COLLEGE. Withers was invited to fill it. 
He was eminently fitted for the post, 
qualified for it, not merely by his singularly 
wide experience, but by an almost unique 
combination of sympathy with the scientific 
spirit in education, the demand for training 
and method, and a devotion to humane 
letters and the best elements of the scholastic 
tradition. Three years (it was all that was 
left to him of life) is all too short a time in 
which to leave a permanent mark on English 
education. But in his new sphere he per- 



MEMOIR 33 

formed incredibly much. " Between the two 
types of university teacher," writes his col- 
league, Mr, Thiselton Mark, '' by no means 
mutually exclusive, the one who lives mainly 
for his subject, and the one who lives mainly 
for his students — the scholar on the one hand 
and the teacher and trainer of men on the 
other — Professor Withers held a sort of 
middle position." One might almost say that 
he tried to do the work of both types of men, 
and the work of a third type, the public man, 
and broke down under the triple strain. No 
professor was ever more faithful to the 
scientific ideal. Confused thinking, lack of 
arrangement, slipshod generalization — these 
things were intolerable to him. And no 
conviction was deeper with him than that the 
subject of which he had been made Professor 
needed to be studied as a science with a 
thoroughness hitherto unknown in England. 
But, again, the human interest was strong in 
him, too — the sympathy that made him seek 
to be helpful to his students in all sorts of 
ways, and that showed itself in his lectures 



34 MEMOIR 

in such practical counsels as " Begin at the 
boy's end." He threw himself, then, actively 
into the life of the College. But in the 
ferment of the educational world he could 
not be suffered to rest in the duties of study 
and of teaching. 

The province of the new Professorship 
was necessarily somewhat undefined, and 
there was no limit either to the possibilities 
of usefulness it seemed to present or to the 
number and variety of the calls that were 
made upon him. A few only of the special 
services that he rendered can be mentioned 
here. He took a large share in organising 
an education department in connection with 
the British Association. At the request of 
the London School Board he drew up the 
Memorandum on the Teaching of History 
which is reprinted in this volume. In the 
University of which he was Professor he 
obtained the recognition of " Education " as 
one of the qualifying subjects for a pass 
degree in Arts, and as one of the optional 
subjects which may be taken either at the 



MEMOIR 35 

intermediate or final stage in a Science 
degree course. When a Committee for the 
Registration of Teachers was instituted by 
the Board of Education, he was nominated 
a member by the Lord President of Council, 
and the Committee unanimously elected him 
to be their first Chairman. He could with 
difficulty be persuaded to accept the post, 
but, when once he had consented, he "took 
up the work," as a colleague on the Com- 
mittee has said, '' with whole-hearted indus- 
try, and the time and devotion he gave to 
the intricate and delicate task of oruidino- the 
Council in building up the Register must 
have been a great drain upon even his great 
powers of endurance." 

But this was not all. He was invited to 
examine secondary schools and report upon 
the teaching, to distribute prizes, to deliver 
addresses to schoolmasters in conference, to 
advise a multitude of correspondents on a 
multiplicity of subjects. Too kind-hearted 
as well as too conscientious to refuse where 
there seemed a chance of being serviceable. 



36 MEMOIR 

he strove to do everything that was asked of 
him. And the tragedy of it all was that he 
who laid such stress on method in his teach- 
ing, and taught it so excellently to others, 
had little method in his own work ; so that 
the endeavour to fulfil his ena-ao["ements often 
put a strain upon him that forethought could 
have avoided. 

He had never married, and though not a 
few of his friends were anxious about this 
ever-increasing strain, none had the power to 
persuade him to take proper care of himself. 
Yet social and domestic life meant much 
more to one of his affectionate nature than 
to the average man. At Isleworth he had 
made a home for his father and mother, 
and his eldest sister had kept house for 
him. At Manchester he lived in the 
house of Dr. England, Warden of Hulme 
Hall (a Hall of Residence for students of 
Owens College), an old friend, and the father 
of a favourite pupil of his Manchester 
Grammar School days. He delighted the 
Hulme Hall students with his bright talk at 



MEMOIR 37 

their dinner-table, his flow of wit, his in- 
imitable story-telling ; delighted them not 
less by his skill in the tennis-court, where he 
was often to be found before breakfast, and 
by the atmosphere of good fellowship that 
always surrounded him. When he could be 
induced to spend a social evening with friends 
and colleagues, his brilliancy of talk, while it 
charmed everybody, proved what enjoyment 
he himself drew from such gatherings. He 
took a keen interest in the Volunteer move- 
ment, and, had his life been spared a little 
longer, he was to have been promoted to the 
rank of Captain, and given the command of 
the Owens College Company. 

For literary work he had never found time 
on a scale on which it would have been 
possible to do justice to his powers. All that 
he did, however, is interesting and fully 
stamped with his own individuality. In his 
first Manchester period he had edited a small 
collection of English ballads for a school 
series of Messrs. Rivington. At Isleworth 
he had edited the Merchant of Venice for the 



38 MEMOIR 

" Warwick Shakespeare," and written the 
paper on the teaching of history, reprinted 
in the present volume, for Mr. Barnett's 
''Teaching and Organisation," and one on 
the relation of primary to secondary schools, 
for Dr. Scott's book, "What is Secondary 
Education ? " During the tenure of his 
Professorship, he wrote the article reprinted 
in this volume from the Contempormy Review, 
one or two papers on the training of teachers, 
several lectures, and a few reviews for 
educational periodicals. 

Professor S. Alexander, who was intimately 
associated with him in his work at Owens 
College, has very kindly contributed the 
following estimate by way of supplement to 
what has already been said : — 

*' Though Withers' work at the Owens 
College was unhappily cut so short, he made 
and left behind him a deep impression. This 
was due, I think, not only nor even in the 
larger degree to the positive results which he 
achieved. It was due rather to the spirit of the 
man and to the illustration he gave of the 



MEMOIR 39 

possibilities of his office. He shewed how much 
valuable work a man inspired by high ideals, 
with a genuine faith in his subject, a strong 
and humane personality, excellent judgment, 
and large practical experience of schools of 
many different types, might do in a subject 
like Education, where science and its practical 
application go hand in hand. He understood 
that subject in a large sense. His chief 
business as a professor was the training of 
teachers, and as to the importance of this work 
he never hesitated. But he regarded the 
training of teachers as one portion of a scien- 
tific study which included everything that 
affected the welfare of schools and school- 
children. 'You know,' he wrote, in a letter 
which Prof. M. E. Sadler quoted at the first 
North of England Educational Conference, 
held at Manchester in January, 1903, 'my fixed 
idea that what is most wanted and is least 
understood in this country is a scientific 
study of Education at the Universities, and 
professional training of teachers as a sub- 
section, so to say, of that study. At 



40 MEMOIR 

present people speak of training as if it 
was the acquisition of technical tricks of 
a dubious kind — the shallowest notion.' 
A broad conception like this carries with 
it an obvious danger. A man might spread 
himself out in many directions, and fail of 
concentration, and the danger was greater 
when, as in Withers' case, his office was new 
and its scope remained for him to determine. 
Doubtless other reasons as well led to the 
excessive amount and variety of educational 
work which he undertook ; but I believe that 
his conception of his subject accounted for it in 
large part. When a friend expostulated with 
him on his doing some inspecting in public 
schools in the South, he replied that it was 
most useful for him in his own special work 
to know what was being done in schools all 
over the country. If he had lived, he would 
probably have learned to limit his activities, 
while retaining his finely large outlook. 
As it was, there were so many valuable things 
in Education for a strong man to do that 
Withers seemed never to have leisure ; and 



MEMOIR 41 

there was much of his occupations, like the 
chairmanship of the Registration Council, 
so important that his friends, in spite of their 
anxiety, could hardly wish him to decline. 

'"Outside his teaching the most important 
single piece of work he did in the University 
was in securing for Education recognition by 
the Victoria University (then composed of 
the three colleges which have now become 
separate Universities) as a degree subject. 
Withers was anxious for this for two reasons. 
In the first place he dreaded the excess of 
work imposed upon students who had to 
acquire their professional training at the 
same time as they did their regular work for 
their degree. In the second place, and this 
was his chief reason, he thought that if 
treated as an extra and professional subject 
and not as an academic one, Education 
would never receive from students or the 
public its proper estimation as a scientific 
subject of study. 

''He took a lively interest in the welfare 
of his students, and not least in their physical 



42 MEMOIR 

welfare. He welcomed the institution of a 
volunteer corps in the College, not only 
on civic grounds, but also because of the 
opportunity such a corps offered to the 
students for collective physical exercise, and 
he served himself as an officer in the corps. 
In his teaching he laid stress on everything 
that helped to form civic and corporate 
character, and attached much importance to 
school games. His students in turn were 
affected by the force and largeness of his 
character, especially the more serious and 
thoughtful of them, who could see behind his 
extreme reserve and a certain shy appear- 
ance of hauteur which he had. His teaching, 
from all that I can hear, was admirably direct, 
practical and free from technicalities, and 
expressed with such point and brevity, that 
some of his pupils looked upon his lectures 
as their models of English style. Withers, 
I suppose, knew less than some other 
teachers of the subject of the details of 
the science. He was still feeling his way, 
and had much to learn. At no time did he 



MEMOIR 43 

use scholastic language, and, like his friend, 
Mr, P. A. Barnett, he liked to disguise 
his scientific principles under the name of 
common sense. But through his sympathy 
with the needs and the minds of children 
themselves, little children as well as older 
ones, through his directness of insight, and 
his use of his own experience as well as of 
what he had learnt, his treatment of educa- 
tional inquiries was, to use the expression of 
a good judge, luminous. 

"His experience at Isleworth had taught 
him the advantage of a practising school for 
a training college, and he would have liked 
to see one of the elementary schools at Man- 
chester used for the purpose by an arrange- 
ment for joint management between the 
School Board and the College. This did not 
prove to be practicable. But Withers was 
keenly interested in the practising school 
which was afterwards instituted in connection 
with the Women's Department of the Day 
Training College, and served on its Com- 
mittee. His teaching was given both to the 



U MEMOIR 

students of the Day Training College (ele- 
mentary school teachers) and to Diploma 
Students (secondary school teachers), more 
largely to the latter class. The problem of 
securing a supply of trained teachers for 
secondary schools was beginning to be felt 
acutely when Withers came to us, and he 
was very anxious for the extension of this 
work. He arranged a series of lectures at 
the College for teachers who were already 
engaged in schools, and secured the co- 
operation with himself and his colleagues in 
Education of several headmasters and head- 
mistresses of schools in Manchester and the 
neighbourhood, who lectured upon special 
topics. H e took a prominent part in organising 
the conference on the training of secondary 
teachers, which was held at Cambridge while 
he lay ill. Withers regarded with favour the 
experiment of instituting, in addition to the 
class of students going through a regular 
course of training in a university, a new 
class of '' student teachers," to be trained more 
largely through apprenticeship in a school. 



MEMOIR 45 

''Outside the College walls his work was 
very various. His services were used for 
examinations in Education in various Univer- 
sities, inspection of schools for the Oxford 
and Cambridge Board, lectures on Education 
in London, and the like. To speak only of 
Lancashire : in Manchester he o^ave a course 
of lectures on the teaching of Scripture for 
the Sunday School Union of Manchester and 
District, which, as I understand, were much 
valued. Scripture teaching was one of the 
subjects in which he was most deeply in- 
terested, the others being English Literature 
and History. He did a considerable amount 
of inspecting of Secondary Schools for the 
University, work which was indeed one of the 
duties of his office. For the new Universities 
it is of great importance to establish by 
inspections and any other means the closest 
relations with the Secondary Schools of their 
province ; and it was fortunate for us in Man- 
chester that Withers came at a time when 
the system of Inspecting by the University 
was being organised. His work in this kind 



46 MEMOIR 

was highly successful. He had the con- 
fidence of headmasters and mistresses, and 
they were willing not merely to listen to his 
suggestions of reform, but to adopt them. 
Thus, I learn from the head of one of the 
large schools how valuable his suggestions 
were towards making greater differences 
between the methods of teaching children at 
different ages, towards use of more modern 
methods and better text-books, towards making 
the teaching of Latin more like that of 
modern languages, towards simplifying the 
teaching of Arithmetic, and the like. He 
had some of the gifts most important for a 
good inspector ; besides the trained capacity 
to see what ought to be done, he had the 
saving wisdom to know how much could be 
done. There was in general a statesmanlike 
quality in Withers' handling of problems 
which doubtless led to his being entrusted 
with public work. The knowledge of this 
deepened the sense of loss which was felt 
when he died at a time when all manner of 
educational questions were arising which called 



MEMOIR 47 

for both knowledge and practical sagacity. 
''He did not take much part in general 
academic business. In dealing with him as 
a colleague, you felt his loyalty and good 
temper and his fairness of mind and con- 
sideration for others. He was sensitive and 
reserved, but there was always the suggested 
strength which did not come forward to the 
front of the man. In public speech he did 
not shew enthusiasm, but a restrained serious- 
ness, which, added to his gift of language, 
made him impressive in a high degree. It 
was easy to become acquainted with the 
gaiety and high spirits and tenderness under- 
neath the surface. Wherever there was any 
human interest, he could always be counted 
on for sympathy. He delighted the char- 
women at the College by singing to them 
at a supper which was given to them at the 
time of the College jubilee. And in friendly 
intercourse he was the best and most genial 
of companions, with a vigorous physical 
enjoyment, and a great love of children, 
animals, and good English literature." 



48 MEMOIR 

One of the attractions of the professorial 
life is commonly supposed to be the length 
ILLNESS AND ^f the summer vacation. Pro- 
DEATH. fessor Withers, however, gave 

himself less and less respite from work, and 
in the summer of 1902 he had scarcely taken 
any holiday. He returned to Manchester 
from the British. Association Meeting at 
Belfast in indifferent health, and was advised 
to undergo a slight surgical operation. Ten 
days after the operation signs of blood- 
poisoning became evident, and for many 
weeks he lay between life and death. And 
while hosts of friends all over the kingdom 
were asking in breathless anxiety for tidings 
of hope, the sufferer in the sick-chamber 
showed — to quote the words of the sister 
who nursed him with the tenderest devo- 
tion — "even in his hour of weakness the 
same sweet qualities, patience, unselfishness, 
thoughtfulness and care for others," which 
had distinguished him all his life. The same 
sister speaks of his " childlike faith and love 
towards God," and of how he would insist on 



^ -^v. '.^ -- -^ ' -11^ 



MEMOIR 49 

''the paramount importance of a loving spirit 
in all our dealings with our fellow-creatures, 
and of helping them by believing in theniy 
'' I read aloud to him a great deal," she 
continues, " but he liked quite simple things, 
such as Mrs. Ewing's books of which he was 
intensely fond, and on Sundays he used to 
choose portions of the Bible for me to read 
to him." After several rallies and relapses 
he seemed early in December to be making 
some real progress towards recovery, when 
he suddenly became worse, lost conscious- 
ness, and passed away peacefully on the 
morning of Friday, December 12. He was 
buried at the Manchester Southern Cemetery 
on the following Monday, after a Memorial 
Service had been held in the large church of 
S. Chrysostom, Victoria Park, Manchester, 
which was crowded with colleagues and 
students of the University, and with personal 
friends from many parts of England. 

There is the less need to add to this outline 
of a life that, to human seeming, was so pre- 
maturely closed, because the 
CONCLUSION. , •" , 1 r 11 

letters and papers that follow 



50 MEMOIR 

will best tell, to those who care to know, what 
manner of man their writer was. It is true 
that his published work did not, in the 
judgment of his friends, represent him at his 
best. Yet the papers on history, and 
the Contempormy article on educational 
authorities, are not only valuable in them- 
selves, but interesting for the light they 
throw upon the things he had at heart. 
He o["ave his life to the cause of educa- 
tion in England. Passionately convinced of 
the value of such an education as helps a 
man 'to see life steadily, and see it whole,' 
he was oppressed by a sense of the waste 
and confusion and misdirected views of our 
educational organization. Two reforms 
seemed to him to be urgently needed. The 
first was the infusion of more ' science ' into 
the Universities, the public schools, and 
English education generally. Not first, or 
chiefly, more 'natural science.' Science 
ment to him ' the whole body of systematic 
knowledge, whether in the humanities or in 
nature-studies.' All departments of know- 



MEMOIR 51 

ledge, and indeed of human life, call for the 
scientific habit of mind ; and a man may 
almost be said to be educated in proportion 
to the degree in which he has acquired it. 
What he desired to see, then, was more 
evidence of a ' trained intellectual habit ' in 
those who pass through our schools and 
Universities. And the other need of our 
schools was 'more humanity.' He would 
have this attained pardy by the reading of 
great literature, pardy by the study of history, 
'Without history,' he said, 'a momentous 
aspect of human life is blank to the imagina- 
tion and dark to the reason.' He had, 
personally, the same sort of vivid historical 
imagination as Dr. Arnold : he could have 
told of himself the story he prefers to tell of 
Arnold — that historical sieges and battles 
entered into his dreams. To the noblest 
literature he was equally devoted ; and one 
or other of the great poets, ancient or 
modern, was always his companion upon a 
holiday. With this conviction of the twofold 
defect of English education dominating him, 



52 MEMOIR 

he did not approve, but neither did he wholly 
despair of, the present trend towards technical 
studies. It was, in his view, a vein which 
the nation would work out and emerge from : 
not a final goal of its endeavour. 

The letters and fragments of letters here 
collected will give a more adequate idea than 
the formal writings of a many-sided but 
harmonious personality. The letter to a 
former colleague (No. xii.) illustrates his 
characteristic manner of looking at human 
life. Evil is 'treachery to comrades': it is, 
' from another point of view, disease.' The 
constitution of his mind forbade him to rest 
content without a rational basis for relio^ion 
and morality ; and he found such a basis in 
the reflection that ' goodness ' alone made 
action possible : ' conceive all men to be 
rogues, and the world would come to a stop.' 
So, if prayer to God could never be demon- 
st7^ated to be of value by its results, he found 
a justification for it in what he held to be its 
conformity with Nature. '' We are so built," 
he told an audience of Manchester teachers. 



MEMOIR 53 

— "our nervous system is such — that we 
cannot possibly spend a quarter of an hour 
at the close of each day before retiring to 
rest thinking earnestly of the duties and 
responsibilities of the morrow, without 
gaining more power, more light." Too 
philosophical to accept any ready-made creed 
from the churches, he was yet by his 
philosophy convinced that only through 
religion was a wholesome explanation of life 
possible, and this was for him the proof of 
its validity. " Religion," he said to a friend 
in the last year of his life, "is the tightrope 
on which the human soul must dance between 
the gulfs of superstition and atheism." On 
some such rational basis he tried to build up 
religion in his students as the force that 
should keep their life sweet and strong at the 
core. And, like Plato, he set a high value 
on gymnastic as the handmaid of music. In 
his Divinity lectures at Isleworth he loved to 
trace analogies between the life of warfare 
and the Christian life, and to point to 
St. Paul's frequent metaphors from physical 



54 MEMOIR 

training and athletic contests. He would 
dwell with earnestness upon the close connec- 
tion between a bad habit of body and morbid 
states of mind, and urge the helpfulness to 
right living of a sound physical condition. 

The practical statesmanship which im- 
pressed so many observers of his public work 
can only be very partially illustrated by 
letters, but some extracts here given (Nos. 
X., xvii., XX.) show at least one side of it — 
the clearness with which he saw what he 
wanted in educational matters, the lucidity 
with which he set it before others. Some 
reveal his love of Nature, his eye for the 
picturesque, his power of graphic description. 
Others recall the often brilliant but always 
kindly humour of his talk. " Dear old X.! " 
he once wrote to one friend of another, ''he 
rides his hobby so unaffectedly that one 
almost forgets the horse is wooden." He 
could use no sterner words of a friend's 
foible. " The severest remark I ever heard 
him make of anybody," recalled a colleague 
after his death, " was that So-and-So was an 



MEMOIR 55 

owl. And he was an owl!'' From other 
letters even those who never knew him may 
divine something of the tenderness and 
depth of his friendships, or the reality of his 
affection for children. The letters about 
R. L. Nettleship (Nos. iii., iv.), as has already 
been said, are a vivid reflection of the writer's 
own character — his single-hearted devotion 
to truth and to duty. Other remembrances 
his friends cherish as a sacred possession, 
though no words can impart them to others ; 
the charm of his frank smile, for example, 
carrying with it instant conviction of the 
sincerity and depth and kindness that lay 
behind ; or the unselfishness which always 
placed the claims of others above his own 
and reached in his later years to a height that 
only the most intimate observers of his life 
could at all comprehend. But it is time to 
draw these memories to a close ; and for the 
final impression left by his personality it 
would hardly be possible to find better words 
than his own. "What a conviction besets 
one of the imperishable life of what we really 



56 MEMOIR 

held dearest. And how it helps one to get 
back to a right scale of values of things. 
Kindness and courage and work alone seem 
worth much." 



Letters 



LETTE RS. 

I. To a Friend. 
A Holiday Letter. 

Hastings, September, 1889. 

. . . And now I am here witli my youngest sister. 
It is a jolly house, with extremely pretty grounds, 
and a sweet view of the sea, which is about a mile 
away. There is an excellent billiard-room, and 
indeed only man is vile, or, when not vile, frumpish. 
I have been leading such a frumpish life myself 
these last few weeks that I can enter to a certain 
extent into the feelings of the unfortunates — the 
defuncta cor^pora vita, whose home is a boarding- 
house, whose literature a newspaper, whose 
occupation gossip, whose exercise a lounge, whose 
recreation dinner. But then, like ^neas in 
Hades, I am cheered by the thought that I have 
a return ticket ; and that at any moment I can go 
back to the world, where there is blood in the 
veins, and where the horny-handed dock-labourer 
is happier far than the queen of a myriad semi- 
animate bath-chair-driven invalids. Indeed, one 



ISI 



60 LETTERS 

can take the step any time one goes down to tlie 
beacli — wliicli my sister and I do very frequently, — 
for there are crowds of British Philistines enjoying 
themselves heartily. 

I like this place very well. The country round 
is beautifully wooded and undulates in a charming 
fashion. The town is triform; on the east is the 
old town, originally a mere fishing village, full of 
dear old wooden houses with beetling upper stories 
and red-tiled roofs. A little to the west of this, 
and divided from it by a projecting cliff, is the 
new town of Hastings, T^ew Askelon, the home of 
the real Philistine on his holiday trip. Further 
west again is St. Leonard's, a superior place, with 
Grecian pillars on the facades of the houses; just 
like Portland Place : this is the abode of the lords 
of the Philistines. The place looks vulgar enough 
at some points, but I had a view of it the other day 
which was in its way as beautiful as anything you 
saw at Eigg, I'm sure. I was sculling in a little 
boat about a mile off the town, on a perfect day, 
and behind I could see the old town crawling and 
curling up the sides of the great green hollow 
between two grey cliffs — in front a pale blue sea, 
overhead sky ditto, and over all a pearly mist such 
as you see in Turner's sea-pictures. 

I have been doing a little work at Plutarch ; and 
pecking away at my favourite authors. I hope 



LETTERS 61 

before long to qualify myself (in case of blindness 
from over-smoking) to go round tbe country 
reciting tbe sonnets of Wordswortb; wbicb 
reminds me tbat yesterday my sister and I looked 
in for a moment at a Roman Catbolic Cburcb 
during evening service and saw a pretty sigbt for 
a picture — four Italian women, musicians (prob- 
ably on concertinas), kneeling in tbe midst of a 
crowd of Britisb Pbilistines; dark-baired tbey 
were, and tbeir faces were dusky, but tbeir 
garments were radiant : radiant still, tbougb worn 
by tbeir travels ; and tbey knelt tbere not tbinking, 
no, nor attempting to follow tbe service, but 
gazing and bearing, gazing at altar and candle 
and bearing tbe bum of tbe Latin. 



62 LETTERS 



IL Amours de Voyage. 

2 Eccles Old Hoad, 

Pendleton, Manchester, 

September 7tli, 1891. 

Here am I back in my rooms all alone, and I feel 

as a boy feels. 
Gone back to scbool from bis home and liis folk — 

bis affections pulled off tbem, — 
So that bis beart bangs on wbile witb its tendrils 

broken and writhing. 
Writhing to feel for the props which it clnng to, 

and played with, and grew from; 
Or as a p^ppy, alone in a yard for the night, for 

the first time, — 
1^0 warm mother to romp with when waking, no 

brothers to lie on 
And to feel sure they are there, when bis sonl is 

down under the blanket : 
Tinder the blanket of sleep, which he dare not 

creep under without them ; 
So he sits up on his paws and cries and cannot lie 

quiet. 



LETTERS 63 

rive sweet weeks liave we been, tliree friends 

together — in Norway 
Chiefly — with books and pipes, in the midst of a 

beautiful country. 
Much have we seen that was noble, the gray North 

Sea deep cloven — 
Cloven deep into furrows by teams of white-maned 

horses, — 
And the great cleft running up to the heart of the 

gray granite mountains. 
Filled with a line of lochs linked one to another by 

rapids, 
Like huge beads of glass whose ends melt and fuse 

them together; 
Noble the walks that we took thro' the pinewood in 

view of the fosses. 
Noble, twice noble, the plunges in swirl of the 

thundering torrent, 
Noble the trout-like swim through depths of the 

lake' s cool silence ; 
Yet had we joy still greater in fellowship. There 

in our log-house 
Dwelt we with fifty others, Norwegian and German 

and English, 
Shedding each some odd tens of years and playing 

like children. 
Back, thro' the looking-glass, gladly we fared with 

children to guide us — 



64 LETTERS 

Otto and Mossa and Hakon and Baba and Dagar, 

and thee too, 
TKee, above all, dear Parson, that never bast 

ceased from tby boyhood 
But goest ever, in bigness a giant, in temper a 

hero. 
Like St. Christopher, huge and strong, with the 

child on thy shoulders. 
Child in thy heart ; and thee too, mother and sister 

of children. 
Fair as a fern that is nourished as well by tears as 

by sunshine. 
Gilbert, too, was with us, a lad with the soul of a 

blackbird. 
Saucy and bright, clear-throated, the nimblest of 

hoppers; and with him, 
Little Fenella, capricious and queer, who tittered 

and trifled. 
Joked and grimaced, with eyes full of tears and 

heart full of passion. 
Tender and true, but unwilling to look so, — God 

rest her quick spirit. 
Many another we knew and loved, — the Gunner, 

of comrades 
Easiest. Humorous he in phrase, but always 

<700(i-humoured. 
Sanguine and never, whatever might happen, 

alarmed or beflustered, 



LETTERS 65 

Beating fate by calm simplicity, like tliat cool 

soldier, 
Lord of tlie matcli-box and pipe in the fairy-tale. 

Lastly the Captain, 
Smart light-infantry driller above, with spiky 

moustaches, 
Scholar below, with slippers and pipe, and fingers 

inserted, 
Some in the pages of polyglot lexicons, some in 

the sheets of 
Subtle war-treatises full of strategic enigmas and 

puzzles. 
These were some of the friends that we lived with, 

and now is my heart sore, 
Sore at the severance, mayhap forever, from them, 

and above all 
Sore at departure from you, companions twain of 

my travel. 



^e LETTERS 



III. To a Friend. 
R. L. Nettleship's Death. 

Blacklieatli, September 4th., 1892. 

Nettleship's loss is a terrible blow to Balliol. 
Tbe incidents of his death are most sad,* though 
there is something, too, that recalls your favourite 
lines : — 

Nothing is here for tears .... 

.... nothing but well and fair. 
And what may quiet us in a death so noble. 

Yet there comes a terrible feeling of umste in the 
thought that these great risks were run only for 
holiday recreation. ... I think on the whole he 
was the greatest as he was certainly one of the 
best and kindest men I have ever known well. . . . 
I suppose a man of such utter truthfulness of 
thought, feeling and act, never existed, and it was 
really that great quality which made him, not 
doubtful, but most careful in statements even 
about trifles like the weather. His fastidious sense 
of truth forbade him to use those slipshod proposi- 

* He had perished on Mont Blanc. — Ed. 



LETTERS 67 

tions wMcli go to make nine-tentlis of ordinary 
talk, just as his delicacy of feeling kept him from 
the sloppy geniality which most folks carry into 
intercourse with others. But he was neither 
sceptical nor proud ; and his devotion to common- 
place duty, and indeed to extra work, self-imposed 
often with the stupidest people, was of the most 
splendid character. The ordinary gossip and 
anecdotes about him are utterly superficial and 
misleading. But to gas about him is worse, for 
gas was both intellectually and morally hateful to 
him. The Manchester Guardian extract you sent 
me was the only satisfactory notice I have seen 
yet. 



68 LETTERS 

IV. To a Balliol Friend. 
The same subject. 

September 6tli, 1892. 

It was very jolly to get your long letters and to 
have an account of all your doings. But liow sad 
tlie circumstances under wliich. I sit down to reply. 
This is the sixth sheet of paper on which I have 
begun to write to you, and hitherto everything I 
have set down about Nettleship's death, I have 
torn up immediately. But I am determined to 
send this away whatever it may be. JFor I know 
you are in fullest sympathy with me about it all : 
it is almost the greatest loss that could have 
happened to us both in common. It is a certain 
satisfaction to think that we did to some extent 
realise and try to show our sense of all that he was 
to us and all that he did for us. But dry words and 
indeed dry feelings thrown into ordinary mould 
seem utterly out of place. Nothing but perfectly 
steady and quiet action, free from all sentiment- 
ality and exaggeration, can worthily be associated 
with the memory of him who was so perfectly 
simple and so absolutely sincere. Yet it is just 
this power of quiet action which is the hardest 
thing in the world to win. If only a portion of his 
spirit might remain with us ! 



LETTERS 69 



V. To a Friend. 
A Holiday Greeting. 

Clifton College, 

March 28tli, 1893. 

I heard from E. this morning that you and H. 
are taking a party of four to Coniston for Easter. 
I must send off a line to catch you before you start, 
so that I may send my good wishes with you. 
Would I were going too; but we are fast here 
until the 20th, so that I shall have no further 
Easter holiday this year than is to be got out of 
putting up books and pictures, and buying furni- 
ture. My eldest sister is to keep house for me, 
and I hope by the time Whitsuntide comes round 
we shall be so far in a civilised state as to be ready 
for visitors. 

You may well imagine that as the time draws 
near for me to leave Clifton, I feel more and 
more sorry to do so, but under all the circum- 
stances I believe I have chosen rightly. The whole 
country here is in a most winning mood; I wish 
you could have seen it from Penpole Point last 
Saturday, when the cross-country run was on, and 
a white thread of runners was stretching over the 



70 LETTERS 

fields below, witli Channel and distant mountains 
behind. 'Twas one of the strikingest scenes you 
can fancy. 

But you will be in the middle of things far 
more magnificent very shortly; what a change it 
will be from last year's Moscow marches if only 
this weather hold up, as seems most likely. 'No 
snowballs for E. and W. but rather " nectarous 
camel draughts " from bedroom jugs and plunges 
faun-like in the milk-bowl of a torrent, followed 
by baths of pure sunshine taken on a warm flat 
rock, such as we had with D. and L. I shall be 
much about with you in my mind's eye. The 
Coniston Old Man was one of the first big hills I 
ever went up, but I have no very clear recollection 
of it, except of the heaps of slate to be crossed both 
in the ascent and descent as we did it. 



LETTERS 71 



VI. To a Friend. 
A Holiday Letter. 

Doniocli, ]^.B., 

August 8th, 1893. 

You will see from the map that Dornoch lies at 
the edge of the Frith of that name. The character 
of the scenery here is just the opposite of that in 
jN'orway. The mountains are in the far distance, 
peaks and shoulders on the horizon; close round 
are huge flat stretches of tawny sand fringed with 
sedgy hillocks; further on again green rolling 
breasts of meadows dotted with copses of fir; in 
front, a huge bay, flanked by two long promon- 
tories on which are fishing villages. The " note " 
of the place is distance,— width of country. You 
may see in the shifty weather we are having now, 
three or four types of day in different quarters of 
the landscape. Mists tumbling over hillsides in 
one part, sunshine on meadows in another, a 
steady downpour from blue-black clouds in a third. 



72 LETTERS 



VII. To a Friend. 
A Holiday Letter : Cromer in Winter. 

Cromer, January 5tli, 1894. 

We are very sorry for our sakes tliat you are 
unable to turn up, but by my soul 'tis bome- 
keeping weather. We sit bere perched on a beaky 
promontory, where the shrieking gusts, wild with 
their race over the plains of Poland and the 
Grerman Sea, shake us furiously. Indeed, to speak 
calmly, to look out from these windows over the 
brown waste of water, and to see the blizzards 
come from the East, makes one think of nothing 
so much as a charge of Don Cossacks over a frozen 
steppe, with snow-dust whirling in front of their 
lances. Thank Heaven, I have no cold and can 
defy the weather. But I am glad I am not 
travelling. 



LETTERS 73 



VIII. To a Friend. 
A Holiday Letter. 

AlnmoutK, Northumberland, 

August 26tli, 1895. 

I am liere with , , and . 'Tis an 

odd little place— still quite unsophisticated— with 
no names to the half-dozen streets it possesses, and 
but one hotel, in which we are at this moment 
located. The Hotel is run with great energy by 
Mrs. B., the landlady, who has the whole place- 
including B. himself— under the best of control. 
The golf-course is a small one— only nine holes — 
and with none of the thrilling features of the links 
at Dornoch. But it is for that reason less heart- 
breaking to the beginner. The beach is flat and 
sandy, and there is no possibility of a Kopf -sprung 
except for shrimpS; but the sea— when you 
ultimately get up to your waist in it, — is as salt 
and exhilarating as elsewhere. The air is keen 
and bracing, and must, I suppose, be doing us all 
good, for we are becoming extremely skittish and 
silly in our behaviour ; and our appreciation of one 



74 LETTERS 

anotlier's jests is becoming generous to a fault. 
S. is looking extremely thin and worn, but lie is 
extremely lively and is as rich in reminiscence and 
reflection as ever. Y. and I are attempting to 
make some way with volumes of a Shakespeare 
series which we have respectively undertaken. 
We also read a good deal of Homer and a little 
Aristotle. Z. is full of philosophy and revelling 
in Bradley's " Logic " and " Appearance and 
llealitv." 



LETTERS 75 



IX. To a Friend's Wife. 

Islewortli, January 3rd, 1896. 

If I could put a frontispiece of my own drawing 
to the book I am sending you, it should be the 

Cbancel of Cburcli just as I saw it yesterday 

with all the prayers and good wishes going up like 
^' flights of angels " round you both. 

But I must content myself with a date which 
will perhaps be a more eloquent inscription than 
anything else. 

I am sending a volume also to [your husband]. 
Perhaps a motto might serve for both ; he will — if 
necessary — interpret for you amori amicitia, or 
stay, I will construe it myself : " Friendship's 
Gift to Love." 

With my return to " robust vigour " I hope to 
get to London for my belated pictures. But the 
books are memorials, and I take much pleasure in 
believing them to be both collections so excellently 
made from such noble literature that they may 
become something more than a mere token. 



76 LETTERS 



X. To a Friend. 
Secondary School Ideals 

Isleworth, 
December 19tli, 1896. 

As to your first point; it is just because I wish 
to prevent tbe School from becoming commercial 
and teclinical in the wrong sense that I want to 
get a human and humane person to work it at the 
start. But, of course, the facts Avill remain : that 
the boys will be mainly sons of clerks and 
shopmen, destined to become in their turn 
shopmen and clerks. 

Nor is there anything involved in the idea of a 
liberal education which need make them ineffective 
or incompetent in their particular line of life. 
Indeed, you will no doubt be of opinion that it is 
not so much the matter as the method which 
stamps an education as liberal or illiberal. But 
we will have nothing to do with Book-keeping or 
Shorthand as Class Subjects, and we will have no 
examining body whose methods we cannot trust 
(which will exclude the Science and Art Depart- 
ment) . 



LETTERS 77 

As to tlie freedom of hand, tliere will be very 
miicli more of that at the Upper School than else- 
where. But here also we cannot start '' in vacuo." 
The freedom of the Head Teacher will consist in 
using his conditions and instruments to the best 
advantage. I do not think he w411 find the authori- 
ties less but more practicable to liberal ends than 
he would anywhere else. 

The fact that the school is to be a model school 
makes it essential that — as you say — the interests 
of the boys should be considered before everything 
else. The plant will be "observed" but the 
observation will not include taking it up by the 
roots or interfering with its growth. And at 
first — necesarily — little use can be made in this 
wa3^ 



78 LETTERS 



XL Letter to an Isleworth Student pursuing a 
Third Year Course abroad at Zurich, 
Switzerland. 

Swiss Primary Schools. 

Isleworth, 

January 12tli, 1898. 

I liave read your last report — on Apparatus and 
Organisation — with great interest. What you 
tell of the thorough connectedness of the Zurich 
system of schools confirms impressions previously 
made. 

I note with special interest what you say about 
the greater use of Books by children of Ziirich 
schools. Do I understand you to mean that Swiss 
children read more than English? If so, how is 
this result brought about .^^ 

I should like you to take as the subject of one 
of your Reports : — To what extent is the Swiss 
system more successful than the English in 
forming permanent literary, artistic, and scientific 
interests and tastes among the people? To what 
causes do you ascribe any difference in this respect 
you may have observed? 



LETTERS 79 

In connection with this I should be glad to 
have from you specimens of the Text-Books used 
in Class by the children; I authorise you to 
expend money up to £1 in obtaining specimens, 
though doubtless you will be able to get some 
given you. You should write inside each the 
Standard by which the book is used, with the 
average age of the children. (Primary School 

only.) ^ 

In connection with the same subject also i 
should like to know what you have seen of the 
use of School Museums and School Libraries. 

Another point I am greatly interested in is the 
amount of Home Work done, and the sort of 
exercise set for Home Work. Any specimens of 
pupils' actual work— of average merit— would 
also be very acceptable. 

A report on the Teaching of History and 
Citizenship would also be valuable. 



80 LETTERS 



XII. To a former Colleague. 
Ethics for Teachers. 

Lowestoft, 

January 2nd, 1900. 

As to your question about Ethics for Teachers, 
don't yon think that the main object should be to 
take the subject out of the region of rather unreal 
" goody goodiness " in which it has commonly 
remained, and to treat it simply and concretely? 
I would begin by calling it the Science of Human 
Action (avoiding all such terms as " morality " 
and even " conduct "). It would be easy to show 
that all Human Action implies combination and 
co-operation, that from the moment of birth 
onwards we are for ever dealing with other men. 
The central problem then for Ethics, regarded 
scientifically, is this : Under what conditions is 
combined action (i.) possible at all (ii.) effective? 

It is clear that combination implies common 
agreement, to whch all are bound. Obvious 
practical illustrations arise out of Games (Cricket 
and Football) and the life of a School or College. 
All the main duties of life may be shewn to 



LETTERS 81 

illustrate tliis general principle — e.g., honesty, 
respect for property, self-control, and right 
dealing with others in every form. All wrong- 
doing, on the other hand, is of the nature either 
of shirking, funking, or fouling. A " good " 
man is one who acts fully up to the tacit agree- 
ment on which all human combined activity is 
based. '' Goodness " therefore makes action 
'possible. Conceive all men to be utter rogues 
and the world would come to a stop. 

Effectiveness also depends on qualities of 
character, and among these we ought to include 
initiative, enterprise, steadfastness, " grit," as 
well as the negative virtues by which a man 
abstains from evil. An interesting illustration of 
this may be taken from international comparisons, 
e.g., Chinese illustrate ineffectiveness of supersti- 
tious routine and general dishonesty; French 
illustrate ineffectiveness of lack of loyalty to 
leaders, and of power of honourable cohesion in 
public life ; Germans illustrate power of systematic 
working to a carefully conceived end; Americans, 
power of initiation and inventiveness, and so on. 

Similarly history shows how great military 
powers like Eome have been reduced to ineffective- 
ness by luxury and self-indulgence. 

The great ethical teachers of to-day are men like 
Lord lloberts, B.P., Kitchener, Lord C. Beresford 



82 LETTERS 

and others, wlio point to the necessity for discipline, 
loyalty, self-control, and common-sense. Without 
these qualities no combination can stand. 

Another simple, concrete idea at the basis of 
ethics is healthiness. Evil is not only treachery 
to comrades; it is, from another point of view, 
disease. All criminals are to a greater or less 
degree abnormal nerve cases, and the study of 
insanity, epilepsy and the like, shows intimate 
connection of brain and spine disease with many 
forms of wrong-doing. This does not destroy 
responsibility but rather increases it. Here comes 
in W. James' splendid chapter on habit, a most 
important ethical conception. 

These points, treated in constant relation to the 
problems of discipline and character-training in 
school, carry us a long way, and show the import- 
ance of physical and moral health. 

Then afterivards may come advanced study 
such as 

I. Ideals of Character. 

The Greek Ideal (Plato's Republic). 

The Ideals of Chivalry (see the introduction to 
the Globe Edition of Morte D' Arthur). 

The Ideals of Shakespeare (characters of Portia, 
Henry Y., etc), "Muscular Christianity" (Kingsley 
and Tom Hughes), The Christian Soldier 



LETTERS 83 

(Gordon, Havelock, Outram and a dozen others) ; 
and so on with other famous examples of the 
Good Man. 

II. Ethics as the Science of Action, implies 
Universal Law and one Mind and Will in the 
world, and so leads to the grand conceptions of 
Duty and Heligion, which have been the Inspiration 
of most great lives and particularly of the Greatest 
of Teachers. 

You will of course use your discretion as to how 
far you go. 

But I would say : begin with what all level- 
headed men of any power of thought and know- 
ledge of the world would agree upon, and go up 
from that to the nobler ideas which have made 
"the wisdom of the world seem foolishness," 

I trust this scribble may be of some service to 
you. 

Nothing is so much wanted as humanistic teach- 
ing in our Schools, don't you think? Connected 
with art and literature it makes a truly grand 
course to work out. 

All good and pleasant things to you and your 
work. 



84 LETTERS 



XIII. To a Friend. 
A Letter of Consolation in Bereavement. 

Hulme Hall, Plymoutli Grove, 
Manciiester, 

February lOth, 1900. 

It was a very kind tliought of yorirs to send me 
the notice. I have a most grateful memory of 
your good Father's hospitable welcome to me — 
was it in 88 or 89? — and of the friendliness with 
which he received a friend of yours. I remember 
his keen delight in Scottish antiquities, and the 
vividness of a knowledge which was first hand and 
full of personal feeling. Other things, too, I 
remember, which are sacred to me and must be so, 
tenfold, to you; signs of a kind and wise soul 
which has found natural words to express its 
strongest feelings. I remember how his strength 
of heart touched me, and reminded me of my own 
Father : — so different from the dumb, half hearted 
state of mind into which our own generation seems 
more and more falling. 

He had finished his course and earned release 
and rest ; but I know that nothing can take ofi the 



LETTERS 85 

poignancy of tKe moment of departure. It will 
grieve yon deeply. Yet I feel confident, too, that 
you will find it quite as natural as I do to pass 
quite sincerely from a grasp of tlie significance of 
deatli, to a grasp of its msignificance. In any 
event, how short an interval separates us. And 
what a conviction besets one of the imperishable 
life of what we really held dearest. And how it 
helps one to get back to a right scale of values of 
things. Kindness and courage and work alone 
seem worth much. 



86 LETTERS 



XIV. To a Friend.^ 
Literature in Education. 

^^ovember 30tK, 1900. 

I fear tliat tlie poor type of novel most commonly 
read is, as it were, a symbol of tbe poor starved 
training in tbe " bnmanities " wbicli is all that tbe 
eliildren get, whether in Primary or Secondary 
Schools. There is so little humanity, so little 
literature, in onr education ! Matthew Arnold told 
US all so forty years ago, but what has been done ? 
... I hope you and all others who work for 
education, not in its professional aspect, with 
examinations in view, but in its relation to life — 
human life as well as individual life — will continue 
to fight, heart and hand, for more literature and 
more humanity in the Schools. 

1. Keprinted from the beautiful and touching tribute to Prof. 
Withers which appeared in the Atheiueum of Dec. 20, 1902. 



LETTERS • 87 



XV. To a former Isleworth Student. 
Swiss Teachers— Logic Text-books. 

Owens College, 

December 8tli, 1900. 

Many tlianks for the Siviss Teachers' Journal. 
It is excellent, and one more proof of the high 
intellectual interest taken by continental teachers 
in their work. It is a splendid idea of yours to 
take it in and so keep in touch with your Swiss 
friends and their work. I hope you will often be 
able to repeat your trip abroad. 

Isow as to the Logic. I think Jevons' little 
primer is quite enough to put in the hands of 
your class, although Welton's " Logical Bases of 
Education " is useful to the lecturer, especially the 
last chapter and the chapter on inductive reasoning. 

I certainly don't think the rules for conversions 
of syllogisms are necessary for teachers. On the 
other hand, the general principles of sound reason- 
ing are of great importance, both deductive and 
inductive. Jevons' adaptation of Euler's graphic 
method is of great use. A great deal of unsatis- 



88 LETTERS 

factory science teaching in object lessons, etc., 
would be put an end to, if teachers thoroughly 
grasped the six main rules of the syllogism. 
Almost all experiments take this form (as 
ordinarily conducted). 

A is B 
C is B 

.-. C is A 

and it is most important that teachers should 
understand why this is invalid reasoning. 

(Exercises in " spotting " fallacies are very 
useful for your class). 

I think you will find two books helpful, viz. : 
James' ''Talks to Teachers on Psychology," and 
''Psychological Foundations of Education," by 
W. T. Harris (International Education Series, 
E. Arnold). The latter has a good deal about 
logic in it. 



LETTERS 89 



XVI. To a Colleague. 

Lowestoft, 

January 4tli, 1901. 

The combined card was a lovely production, and 
I shall carefully preserve it as a record of tlie 
Pilgrims and tlieir very merry wit. I am not 
equal to a reply in kind, so I send you a newspaper 
with a pretty bad report of a speech of mine 
delivered yesterday in Norwich to the nationally 
federated Head Teachers. The good people had 
brought their fate upon their own heads, and I 
could have cried that so noble a theme should have 
to be handled before them by me. However, I got 
through it, and they seemed pleased, as folks 
always are until they're told it's all in Herbart. 



90 LETTERS 



XVII. To Mr. Graham Wallas. 

History and Citizenship : Proposal to celebrate 
Special Days in the Schools. 

Owens College, Manchester, 

Febrnary 3rd, 1901. 

Recent events have rather helped us, by rousing 
a general interest in the history of at any rate the 
last two generations, and by lifting people out of 
their customary indifference to the great things 
happening about them. 

This appears to me to be a particularly favour- 
able moment to propose the formal celebration in 
all the schools of certain conspicuous dates, to be 
chosen by your committee. How would Nov. 9th 
do for London Day? Could you get the Lord 
Mayor and the Borough Corporations interested in 
having some Citizenship Day, on which the growth 
of London and its old Merchant Companies, and 
the development of London's Trade might be com- 
memorated ? 

To this there might be added, say, a King's Day, 
and an Empire Day. 

The preparation also of a Calendar of Heroes 



LETTERS 91 

in Peace and War, National and International, 
would, I think, excite mucli more interest just 
now than it would have done three or four years 
ago even. Such a Calendar might be issued 
annually by a publisher— the Board agreeing to 
buy so many hundred on condition that the design, 
etc., was annually submitted in proof to their 
committee. There would be plenty of sale outside 
for it. For the first year or two it might be pre- 
pared under your directions. 

For all these matters this seems indeed the 

psychological moment. If you could get to 

write to the Times, or better still, write yourself, 
just at the moment of the appearance of the 
memorandum, I believe you would have public 
opinion behind you to a surprising degree, and 
you could, by its help, brush aside any little re- 
calcitrance on anybody's part. Indeed, the move 
may possibly turn out highly popular, if it is put 
' in the right light at the beginning. 



92 LETTERS 



XVIII. To a Colleague. 

The " Practical Teacher."— The Holy Word 
" Correlation." 

Hulme Hall, 

June 30tli, 1901. 

The Practical Teacher is excellent; your Forest 
of Arden charms me and fills me with Wanderlust. 
The Practical Teacher is surely much the best 
printed thing that enters the Primary Schools. 
The weary polemics are kept in something like 
their true proportion. Your Forest of Arden and 
the photograph of Winchester Cathedral must he 
a real refreshment to folks. All blessings on the 
Paper and its Writers. 

As to the Holy Word "Correlation," I fear we 
shall have to change it to " Coherence " or 
"Connectedness," or something else beginning with 
'"Co." There is something in the present name 
which leads people to deny, in their fury, the 
simplest truths of the world and the human mind. 
But how little avails arguing ! It is when people 
work and enjoy working, and sing as they work, 
that people come and stand round the smithy door, 
and look and listen. 



LETTERS 93 



XIX. To a Colleague. 
Dickens. 

St. Anne's-on-tlie-Sea, 

September 2iid, 1901. 

I am reviewing my Dickens — with pleasure on 
the whole, but I find I have to skip a good deal 
that I used to read keenly once. Strange that a 
man with so amazing a power of humour should 
also be the victim so often of mere bunkum and 
false sentiment. It really seems as if there were 
a strain of Chadband in him as well as of Sam 
Weller. One notices the same combination in 
Americans occasionally. And yet humour is sup- 
posed to save folks from being maudlin. It did 
not save Dickens. Was it that he only knew, after 
all, a very narrow part of human life, or are the 
psychologists wrong about humour? 



94 LETTERS 



XX. To a Colleague. 
Training of Teachers. 

St. Anne's-on-tlie-Sea, 

September 5tli, 1901. 

As to the Diploma students I think it would be 
well that they should do some teaching from the 
very first, partly because otherwise they do not get 
practice enough in the course of the session, and 
partly because without some practice the books on 
Education have so little meaning to them. On 
the whole, I think it best for them to begin with 
Infants and very small children, and to devote 
most of their time to tbem during the first term. 
As for Eeading, I would suggest one simple text- 
book on the mechanics, so to say, of instruction, 
such as Salmon's "Art of Teaching," and one good 
book on the Philosophy of Infant Teaching, such 
as Herford's Froebel. As they will naturally 
attend the Criticism Lesson and the Conference 
they will require enough instruction to explain 
these, and that will necessitate one lesson a week, 
at least, on general principles of instruction. 

Three, or at the most four, hours of regular 



LETTERS 95 

tuition a week with you should be as much as they 
can digest, with home-reading set in connexion 
with it, criticism-lesson, school-practice, and 
attendance at one or two of the Day Training 
College Lectures. Besides this they will probably 
have a course with Professor Alexander, I suppose, 
and certainly they will come for three hours a 
week to me. If you will take charge of their 
practice in the first term, I will, as before, in their 

second and third. Girls in the position of 

appear to wish for personal coaching in teaching, 
and it is as well that this should begin from the 
first. 

All this, of course, is by way of suggestion, and 
I should be glad to know if you think it needs 
amendment at any point. 

With regard to the politics of our position for 
next year, you will see that Circular 454 means in 
the course of the next year or two a delegation on 
the part of the Government of the work of examin- 
ing Training College Students to other authorities, 
such as Universities, etc. This means that we 
shall have to fight for our own hand without much 
help from Whitehall. That being so, if we are 
not in the same sort of position as the teachers of 
other subjects, we shall continue, as heretofore, to 
be driven into corners and to fight always at a 
disadvantage. 



96 LETTERS 

Tlie first thing, therefore, is to have Education 
put on a proper academic footing, with a Board of 
Studies, in which you, as a University Lecturer, 
would have a place. 

The next thing is to seek to have our subjects 
recognised in some way — instead of leaving them, 
as they are now, pure surplus on the top of a 
Degree Course. In this way we should do some- 
thing to remedy the over-pressure which is the 
worst of all forms of Training for a Teacher, 
because it strangles the very life of education. 
The University cannot continue to put Teaching 
on a less favourable footing than Engineering or 
Agriculture. 

I must not trouble you with more of this at 
present. But the work is exciting enough: for it 
means, the placing of the professional training of 
teachers on a better administrative basis. 



LETTERS 97 



XXI. To a Colleague. 

20, East Beacli, Lytham, 

December 26tli, 1901. 

I am looking over Examination Papers and 
writing letters in lodgings by myself. My land- 
lady thinks I am a detective, connected with the 
Liverpool Bank case. The device of having letters 
addressed to me as Professor, she regards as well- 
meant, but transparent, because in other respects 
I am not like a Professor. It is hopeless to argue 
with her, because she regards that as a further 
attempt at disguise. I have been trying to think 
what would occur, if everybody resolutely believed 
everyone was somebody else. Perhaps, after all, 
that is very much what they do. 



98 LETTERS 



XXII. To a Colleague. 

20, East Beach, Lytham, 

December 29tli, 1901. 

Please gire my hearty greetings to all your 
Gesellschaft. I envy yon Ben Lomond, but then 
he is not propitious to Examination papers and 
such like labour. I have been doing some general 
knowledge papers which are really better than I 
had expected. Of course there are some extra- 
ordinary folk who put down as among the greatest 
living writers Marie Corelli, Byron, Annie Swan, 
and W. M. Thackeray; and another who says she 
saw, on a visit to the Art Museum, " a statute of 
Venus and several other Roman beauties." 

All good things to you and your enterprises. 



LETTERS 99 



XXIII. To a Colleague. 

Hulme Hall, 

July 20tli, 1902. 

Miss 's note reads well. I cannot enough 

admire people who give themselves to that kind of 
work; they need to be strong as well as good. If 
after seeing enough to realise thoroughly what she 
is going to do, she still abides by her resolve, why 
then this year of preparation will be arming her 
for her quest among all the evil results of bad 
food, bad air, and other perverted conditions of a 
modern town. This is a pilgrimage of rescue in 
good earnest, and few would have the wit and the 
worth to undertake it. 



100 LETTERS 



XXIV. To a Colleague. 

Owens College, 

July 29tli, 1902. 

I wish I could have come with you all into 
Germany. I should like to have heard the Lectures 
on all the excellent subjects. Pray present my 
respectful homage to Professor Rein and my hearty 
greetings to all your party. I will write a human 
letter when I am free of Exams 

If you can get any nice things for an Education 
Museum when you are abroad, please think of it. 
A relic of Herbart, a MS. of Rein, pictures, photos, 
anything ? Must we not have a Museum now ? Is 
it in Leipsic they have such.^ Books, appliances, 
photographs, charts, and relics ! 



LETTERS 101 



XXV. To a Colleague. 

Holyhead, 

August 6tli, 1902. 

It was very pleasant to get your letter and to 
know how things are going in Jena. The Child 
Study programme is interesting. We ought to 
make more use of Doctors in England; their 
method is so well-developed and self-confident, 
compared with the tentative experiments of 
Teachers. Prithee send me any more printed 
matter that comes your way, and let me hear what 
occurs at your lectures. Are you proceeding upon 
the Gouin system .^ or the Xeuere Richtung? 

I am staying for a few days at Holyhead. I 
asked a friend to recommend me a quiet place in 
IS". Wales, and he said the Station Hotel, Holyhead. 
It has a railway station on each side and steamer- 
docks at the back. Anyone falling out of a 
bedroom-window would alight on the deck of the 
Dublin Packet Boat. The principal trains have 
two locomotives each, and they arrive respectively 
at 2-10 a.m. and 3-30 a.m. Then the people are 



102 LETTERS 

driven in flocks like sheep to tlie steamers under 
the glare of great electric moons, and finally the 
steamers sound their sirens and swim out into the 
Irish Sea. There is no garden — still less a Pine- 
Forest — round the Hotel. After dessert, one drinks 
one's coffee on a seat in the railway station which 
happens to be unoccupied at the moment. But the 
roads round are fair for bicycling ; there is a good 
bathing-place in the harbour; and the distant 
views of Snowdon are grand. Xext Monday I go 
to Stonyhurst to lecture to young Jesuit School- 
masters for a week, then I go up to Westmorland 
in search of a substitute for a Pine-Forest. 



Ancient History 



ANCIENT HISTORY. 

[Reprinted (by permission of Messrs. Longmans) from "Teach- 
ing and Organisation," edited by P. A. Barnett, 1897.] 

Associations of the Subject with Arnold. 

This subject lias a peculiar personal interest for 
English students of educational practice and 
theory. History was a favourite subject with 
Arnold. He was for ever working at it himself. 
"" One of the few ^ recollections which he retained 
of his father was that he received from him at 
three years old a present of Smollett's ' History of 
England ' as a reward for the accuracy with which 
he had gone through the stories connected with 
the portraits and pictures of the successive reigns." 
In his professorial chair at Oxford he quoted Dr. 
Priestley's " Lectures on History " from his re- 
membrance of what he had read, when he was 
eight, 2 in the school library at Warminster. ''At 
Winchester he was a diligent student of E-ussell's 
' Modern Europe ' ; Gibbon and Mitf ord he had 
read twice over before he left school." After his 
election to a fellowship at Oriel, the first book he 
took out of the College library was Eymer's 
" Ecedera." And so to the end. 

1. Stanley's Arnold, chap. i. p. 3 ('Minerva Libraiy' Series). 
2. Ibid. 



106 ANCIENT HISTORY 

He was not content that history should be " sl 
plan " ; it must also be " a picture." Towards this 
end his unceasing research (carried on even in the 
heaviest stress of school work) among the original 
authorities for the periods which he taught, was, 
as he always maintained, a help not to be dispensed 
with. So lively was his interest that he quite took 
the events of history to heart and made a personal 
matter of them. They often troubled his dreams ; 
he would be "present at the assassination of Csesar, 
remembering distinctly his conversation with 
Decimus Brutus, and all the tumult of the scene in 
the Capitol." Sulla he knew by sight — " with the 
livid spots upon his face, but yet with the air and 
manner of Walter Scott's Clave rhouse." ^ 

This intensity of feeling entered, natural and 
unforced, into his history lessons, and made them 
unforgettable. In the good or evil fortunes of 
Rugby, as a self-governing society or common- 
wealth, he could not help seeing illustrations of 
the working of all free institutions, whether Greek, 
E-oman, or English. In these illustrations he 
recognised the unique opportunity by which, in a 
public school, the life of the community gives 
substance and meaning to history, at the same 
time that history shows the dignity and service- 
ableness of the organised life of the school. All 
1. Chap. iv. p. 113. 



ANCIENT HISTORY 107 

this illustrated his favourite idea — tlie oneness of 
human life, in virtue of which he maintained the 
great classic writers to be '' modern authors " — 
cencerned, that is, with a stage of political 
development analogous to ours. The study of 
Thucydides he held to be *^not an idle inquiry 
about remote ages and forgotten institutions, but 
a living picture of things present, fitted not so 
much for the curiosity of the scholar as for the 
instruction of the statesman and the citizen " 
(Preface to vol. iii. of his 'Thucydides').^ 

Arnold's practice and theory will form the 
starting-point for the treatment of the subject 
here. When the rules and first principles of an 
art are in debate, as is the case in England with 
the art of teaching, the method of investigation 
most likely to be fruitful in results and least likely 
to divide opinion is that which refers constantly 
to the handling of the art by one of its acknow- 
ledged masters. 

1. A fine instance of his application of ancient history to 
the circumstances of school occurs in a letter to a colleague, 
referring to certain criticisms on Rugby discipline. "When 
we are attacked, we have some right to say with Scipio, who, 
scorning to reply to a charge of corruption, said, ' Hoc die cum 
Hannibale bene et feliciter pugnavi'— ' We have done good 
enough, and undone enough evil to allow us to hold our 
assailants cheap." The passage recalls Matthew Arnold's 
witness to his father's power of making history credible : 

' Through thee I believe 
In the noble and great who are gone.' 



108 ANCIENT HISTORY 

Prelimiiiary Questions. 

The inquiry implied in the subject is a double 
one : 

1. In point of organisation, what place should 
be given to ancient history in the curriculum of a 
school ? 

2. In point of teaching, how is the individual 
teacher to make sure that his pupils get the most 
they can out of the work ? 

In dealing with the first of these questions it will 
be necessary to take history as a whole, apart from 
the divisions into which its subject-matter falls. 
These are, indeed, quite arbitrary. We may agree 
with Arnold that the year 500 a.d. is the most 
convenient date at which to say that ancient 
history closes, since it is the nearest round and 
easily remembered number to the period which 
marked the decisive entry of two new and striking 
elements into political history — Christianity and 
the Teutonic races. But the distinction does not 
affect the question of the place of history in a 
school curriculum. 

Every time-table is a numerical expression of 
the relative values of different studies in the sum- 
total of training. Is history " worth its place " in 
a time-table, and how big a place shall it have? 
Which, again, implies the question : Is there any- 



ANCIENT HISTORY 109 

thing, either in the information conveyed or in the 
faculty cultivated by the study of history, that 
should make it an indispensable part of education ? 
The province of history^ in the kingdom of 
knowledge is the past of mankind, and more 
particularly the past of mankind as organised in 
political communities. In a very vague and wide 
sense history may be said to include such studies 
as deal with man individually and socially 
(anthropology, archaeology, etc.) ; but in its specific 
sense, and as a school-subject, history is the 
"biography of political societies." It therefore 
has so much in common with art — and in particular 
witli the art of literature — that its aim is to con- 
struct a representation of human life. But human 
life in a special aspect is its theme, and this it 
seeks to reproduce as a series of events in order of 
time. The use of the order of time and the treat- 
ment of men as grouped in governments are the 
specific marks of history. Thus it has so much in 



1. The word itself is interesting ; — originally, of course, 
icTTopta meant inquiry or investigation of any kind. By Aristotle 
it is applied to that preliminary collection and record of the 
' facts ' of a subject which must precede discovery of general 
principles ; such, e.g. as his own account of animals, which, 
imitated by Plinj^ has given vogue to the term ' Natural 
History.' The specially human sense which the word generally 
bears now is due perhaps to the influence of the opening- 
sentence of the Father of History himself : ' H/aoSorov 
^AXiKapyrjo-a-T^os IcrropLrj'? aTroSe^ts yjSe. 

' Story ' is only a truncated form of the same word. 



no ANCIENT HISTORY 

common with, natural science that it proceeds only 
after a methodical study of given matter and aims 
at stating what has actually occurred. To do this 
it must have canons of evidence, by which it 
decides whether or no this or that really did 
happen. 

The importance of the information, then, con- 
veyed by history seems to lie in this : that without 
it a momentous aspect of human life must 
remain blank to the imagination and dark to the 
reason, and that if we are ever to arrive at an 
understanding of things as they are, it can only 
be by a knowledge of the process by which they 
came to be so. The importance of the faculty 
which it trains is that it is a faculty constantly 
required for critical issues in actual life. The 
importance of the subject might not seem to need 
enforcing. But it is still only an optional subject 
in English primary schools, and, in point of 
fact, greatly neglected as systematic matter of 
instruction.^ In France the children in primary 
schools not only receive a thorough grounding in 
the history of their own country and of its 
relations to its neighbours, but are also taught in 
outline some of the main salient facts about the 
great Eastern civilisations to which we owe the 

1. In the Blue Book for 1895-6, out of 22,765 school depart- 
ments examined in ' class subjects,' only 3,597, or less than a 
sixth, are reported as presenting history. 



ANCIENT HISTORY 111 

beginnings of our own. In Germany the scheme 
is not so elaborate, but insures, even in elementary 
schools, a clear outline of German history. 

As regards secondary schools, a consideration 
of the nature of history leads to two corollaries : 

1. That in point of iiiformation an ideal 
curriculum in history will, as a final result, give 
some outline, however meagre, of the continuous 
series of events by which Western Europe has 
come to be what it now is. 

2. That in point of faculty an attempt will be 
made with the higher forms to convey a mastery, 
however imperfect, of the laws of evidence by 
which a great historian assures himself of the 
credibility of his ^ facts," of his manner of dealing 
with a mass of material, and of the descriptive 
art by which he selects typical points for narration. 

Two Schemes of History Teaching. 

Taking it now for granted that history is to be 
taught, as an indispensable subject, through all 
the forms of a secondary school, I shall put in 
for consideration two schemes of history teaching : 
one, only in outline, sketched by Arnold in his 
essay called " Rugby School — Use of the Classics," 
reprinted in his " Miscellaneous Works " (London, 
1845) ; the second, that of the Prussian higher 
schools, as set forth in the "Lehrplane und 



112 ANCIENT HISTORY 

Lehraufgaben fxir die hoheren Schulen" (pub. 
Berlin, 1896), by Wilbelm Hertz, with tbe 
authority of tbe Prussian Minister of Education. ^ 
In regard to the latter it is particularly worthy of 
note that an identical course is laid down in 
histoiy for Gymnasien and Eealschulen (classical 
and modern schools). 

A. — Arnold's Scheme of Historical Study. 

(a) For Young Children 

A series of lessons on pictures or "prints" of 
scenes from universal history portraying remark- 
able events in striking fashion. Their main object 
is to give vivid centres of association round which 
to group the stories. [Arnold seems to have been 
conscious that he himself owed much to the 
method of combining a story picturesquely told 
with a picture speakingly drawn. See the story 
given above of his exploit at three years old, and 
compare the passage in " Stanley," c. iii., p. 100. 
"In examining children in the lower forms he 
would sometimes take them on his knee and go 
through picture-books of the Bible or of English 
history, covering the text of the narrative with his 
hand, and making them explain to him the subject 
of the several prints."] 

1. Officially designated 'The Minister for Ghostly, Educa- 
tional, and Medicinal Affairs.' 



ANCIENT HISTORY 113 

(6) For the Middle Forms of Schools 

The study of brief and lively histories of Greece, 
Rome and England. 

TKe main purpose at this point is to excite 
curiosity and to stimulate appetite for increased 
knowledge. 

(c) In the Higher Forms 

The study of some first-rate historian "whose 
mind was formed in, and hears the stamp of, some 
period of advanced civilisation analogous to that 
in which we now live," such, for instance, as 
Thucydides or Tacitus. In this stage the teacher's 
object will be to encourage reflection among his 
pupils by leading them to study (i) the criteria of 
a credible narrative ; (ii) the causes of events and 
the history of institutions. They will be trained 
to look for the important points, to make 
judgments, and to apply them to analogous 
circumstances. 

B. — Course of Historical Study for Secondary 
Schools in Prussia (Classical and Modern 
alike) arranged for nine Years. 

This falls into three main divisions : 
(a) First two years, preparatory (in two lowest 
forms). One hour a week of oral instruction 



114 ANCIENT HISTORY 

without text-book of any sort, firstly, in 
"picturesque biographies" (''Lebensbilder") from 
the history of the Fatherland, starting from the 
children's own time and district; secondly, in the 
"saga-like" early history of the Greeks and 
Romans. 

(/3) From the third to the sixth year, intermediate ^ 
(from "Qua,rta" to "Untersekunda"). 

(i) A general review in outline of Greek history 
to the death of Alexander the Great, 
and of Roman history to the death of 
Augustus, with brief references to the 
influence of primitive Oriental civilisation 
on Greece and Rome. Two hours a week 
for one year, 
(ii) Starting from the death of Augustus and 
a sketch of the history of the Roman 
Western Empire, an outline of German 
history to the close of the Middle Ages. 
Two hours a week for one year. 
(iii) German history from the close of the 
Middle Ages to the accession of Frederick 
the Great. Two hours a week for one 
year. 

1. The forms of German secondary schools are arranged for 
a nine years' course, every boy nominally remaining a year in 
each form. The forms are numbered from bottom to top, 
contrary to the English practice, VI., V.. IV., III. B and A, 
II. B and A, I. B and A. 



ANCIENT HISTORY 115 

(iv) ^German history from the accession of 
Frederick the Great to the present time. 
Two hours a week for one year. 

(y) Advanced, last three years from " Ober- 
sekimda" to " Ober Prima." 

(i) Revision of the chief events of Greek 
history down to the death of Alexander, 
and of Roman history to the fall of the 
Roman Empire in the West, with a closer 
study of the causes and effects of the 
events described, and of ancient institu- 
tions, political and social. Three hours 
a week for one year, 
(ii) Study of ''epoch-making" events of 
universal history from the fall of the 
Roman Empire in the West to the close 
of the Thirty Years' War, with special 
reference to historical cause and effect. 
Three hours a week for one year. 

(iii) Study of the chief events of modern history 
from the close of the Thirty Years' War 
to the present day, with special reference 
to the House of HohenzoUern. Three 
hours a week for one year. 

1 N B —In every case where a period of Germany history is 
to be studied, the official syllabus lays downs that external 
history, so far as it is of world-wide importance, is to be taken 
along with German. The syllabus also insists on the study ot 
the geographical background of history. 



116 ANCIENT HISTORY 

Prussian IN'otes on Method. 

Tlie official syllabus for Prussian secondary 
schools defines the general object of the historical 
course as follows : First, the imparting of a certain 
knowledge, viz., that of the most striking events of 
universal history, together with a more detailed 
account of German and in particular Prussian 
history; secondly, "the development of the 
historical sense." 

It appears also from the '' Remarks on Method," 
which follow the curriculum, that the Prussian 
Ministry of Education desires to impress upon its 
teachers the duty of carrying out the present 
Emperor's wish that the children should be warned 
against revolutionary methods in politics, and 
should be encouraged to loyalty and patriotism. 
The directly practical and national colour given 
to history teaching in G-erman schools, and its 
vigorous appeal to feeling, are as strikingly 
characteristic as the system and the symmetry 
with which, on the intellectual side, the scheme 
of instruction has been planned. In these remarks 
on method special attention is called to the 
necessity of studying the social and economic 
aspects of modern history with the older boys. 
But great stress is laid on the difference of method 
to be employed in the intermediate and advanced 



ANCIENT HISTORY 117 

^ ?s of tlie course. In the intermediate, it is 
the external and picturesque aspect of history and 
the personality of great men that are chiefly to 
be dwelt upon. In the advanced, the study of the 
causation of events and of the inner life of 
institutions is to be the main point. ^ 

SlMILAHITlES BETWEEN THE TWO ScHEMES. 

It will be seen that in some points there is a 

remarkable agreement between the courses schemed 

respectively by Arnold and the Prussian Ministry 

of Education. They are at one in recommending 

a triple course, adapted to three stages of mental 

growth; each section roughly to cover the whole 

ground as regards matter, but to take different 

aspects of it, and to treat them in a wholly different 

spirit and method. Arnold's plan, in the third 

stage, of connecting the study of history with the 

literary study of great historical writers, seems 

sounder than the Prussian idea of insisting so 

much upon the present-day political bearings of 

the subject. 

1 The historical curriculum in French Classical secondary 
schools, as by decree of Jan. 28, 1890, is very similar m_ matter 
covered to the Prussian course. The history of France is taken 
in fully as great detail as the history of Prussia. One whole 
Year (in the 'classe de sixieme' for boys of eleven) is given to 
the ancient civilisations of the East. But the essential point 
of the systems, both of Arnold aud the Prussian Ministry, 
viz. , the double survey of the ground in two stages (after the 
preparatory stage), is lost in the French system. 



118 ANCIENT HISTORY 

Principle of the two Schemes. 

The princijjle of arrangement is the same in 
both cases. The subject-matter is arranged, not 
in the order which would occur to an historian as 
the "natural" or "logical" order prescribed by 
the subject itself, but in a "psychological" order, 
prescribed by the varying interests and capacities 
of children at different stages of growth. 

Accepting this as the true principle, and having 
in view the needs of an English secondary day 
school, of the grammar school or " local " type, 
such as, on the average, keeps its boys from nine 
to eighteen, we should accept also the three stages, 
with a few preliminary notes on them. 

Notes on the Three Stages. 

(a) The preparatory stage will have partly been 
done at home or in a preparatory school. Pure 
narrative may to some seem out of place, even in 
the First Form. But the text-book will be of the 
simplest. The subject-matter will be mainly 
biographical, and the lives selected will be from 
all ages and countries of European history. The 
effect of the lessons will still mainly depend on the 
power of the teacher to "tell a story." It has 
been shown by experiments that dramatic repre- 
sentations of historical scenes by young children 



ANCIENT HISTORY 119 

themselves are most effectual in making an 
interesting and lasting impression. 

(b) In the intermediate stage, from ten to 
fourteen, boys are ready for history, but with the 
element of story still strongly marked in it. The 
picturesque and stirring side of things, movement 
and adventure, and the good or evil fortune of 
persons, will interest them most. But their interest 
in their heroes once awakened, they will, for their 
sakes, willingly learn a great deal about the tedious 
matters in which those heroes were engaged. At 
this stage everything seems to depend on two 
conditions not easy to reconcile : first, on getting 
rapidly over the ground and passing boldly from 
period to period and country to country ; secondly, 
on giving detail in sufficient abundance to make 
the narrative imaginable to boys at an age when 
they see everything " from the small end," in its 
most concrete and personal form. It will be best 
perhaps to take chapters of history here and there, 
the master himself bridging the gaps with needful 
summaries, but pressing on and keeping the sense 
of movement always lively. If there is a good 
middle-school library, and the boys are reading 
"Hereward" and "Old St. Paul's" and "Wood- 
stock" and "Erling the Bold" and "The Cloister 
and the Hearth" and "Ivanhoe" for themselves, 
there will not be so much need for the master to 



120 ANCIENT HISTORY 

insist on the picturesque aspect of history in form 
work. 

(c) Accepting Arnold's proposal to connect 
history at this stage directly with the work in 
literature, we shall still require, if the history of 
the people of the Mediterranean and Atlantic sea- 
boards is to be in any outline, however meagre, 
present as a continuous series of events to the mind 
of the pupils at the end of the course, two or three 
books, such as Freeman's short ^' General Sketch 
of European History," Bryce's "Holy Eoman 
Empire," or, in the Fifth Form, C. M. Yonge's 
excellent " Landmarks of History — Ancient, 
Mediaeval, and Modern." Books for reference in 
the school library become only too abundant at 
this stage. Besides Grote and Mommsen, and 
Freeman's "Historical Essays," there are Duncker's 
"History of Antiquity," and some of the volumes 
of those two excellent series "Story of the iSTations," 
and " Heroes of the jN'ations " ; and for an introduc- 
tion to the philosophy of history Maine's "Ancient 
Law," and Bagehot's "Physics and Politics." 

Connexion of the Study of Ancient History 
vs^iTH the Scripture Lesson. 

An enormous opportunity and advantage will be 
thrown away unless, all through the course of 



ANCIENT HISTORY 121 

Kistory, the Scripture lessons are so arranged that, 
among other things, and with due respect to the 
main purpose for which they are given, they may 
on the historical side help to fill in the outline of 
ancient history. x^o small part of our life is 
Semitic as well as Aryan; and the relation of 
Aryan to Semite is a most fruitful subject of 
study. The elementary facts of it can best be 
given through the Biblical lessons. In the history 
of the Hebrews we come necessarily into contact 
with the great Eastern Empires — Egypt, Assyria, 
and Persia. Later, in the period between the Old 
and New Testament, the age of the Septuagint 
version and the Apocrypha, boys may get to know 
something of a most important epoch, which 
is, perhaps necessarily, neglected in "secular" 
history, the Alexandrine epoch and the age of 
the Hellenistic monarchies. Later again they 
approach the richest possible mine of historical 
interest in the '^Acts of the Apostles," where East 
and West meet in the person of St. Paul, a Hebrew 
of the Hebrews, yet born a citizen of Pome, a son 
of Benjamin who wrote letters in Greek and quoted 
Greek poetry and philosophy; arrested in the 
Temple at Jerusalem for breach of Levitical law; 
saved from his own countrymen by Poman legion- 
aries to defend himself before Poman governors 
and to claim a trial at Pome, in the highest court 



HISTORY SCHEME 



Form 



Hours 



n] 



ji. 



W 



III. 2 



IV. 2 J 



Subject-matter 

Some striking scenes 
from European history, 
ancient and modern 



Chapters from the his- 
tory of the English 
people, from their en- 
try into Britain to the 
present day 



First Term. — Britain 
before the coming of 
the English. The 
Romans in Britain 

Second Term. — Chapters 
from Roman history 
down to 145 B.C. 

Third Term. — Chapters 
from Roman history to 
the invasion of the 
Teutonic races and 
the withdrawal of the 
Roman legions from 
Britain 



First Term,. — Roman s 
and Greeks ; Pyrrhus, 
Flamininus, and the 
Roman conquest of 
Greece ; Graeco-Roman 
life ; Herculaneum and 
Pompeii 

Second lenn. — Greek 
history to 145 B.C. 

Third Term. — G reel: 
history to the capture 
of Constantinople by 
the Turks 



To CORRESPOND WITH 

(in the historical part of 
the Scripture lesson) 

Patriarchs, judges, 
and kings in the 
Old Testament 



Chapters from the 
history of the 
Hebrews, from 
the migration of 
Abraham to the 
present day 



Hebrew history, 
from the first 
alliance of the 
Maccabees with 
the Romans down 
to the destruction 
of Jerusalem by 
Titus, along with 
an outline of 
the spread of 
Christianity to 
500 A.D. 



Hebrew history, 
from the first 
king to the time 
of the Maccabees ; 
theJews in Baby- 
lon ; their return 
under Cyrus; 
Alexander the 
Great; Jews and 
Greeks; the 
Septuagint ver- 
sion 



HISTORY SCHEME 



Form 



Hours 



,v. 



^VI. 3 1 



Subject-matter 

First Term. — A reading 
in modern history, e.g. 
England iinder George 
III., with selections 
from Burke 

Second and Third Terms. 
— Rome and Carthage, 
with readings from 
Livy and Polybius 

Modern Side. — French 
history in French 
authorities 



To CORRESPOND WITH 

(in the historical part of 
the Scripture lession) 



Hebrew history, 
from Abraham to 
Saul ; Israel in 
Egypt ; Egyptian 
and Phoenician 
civilisation 



In the First Term, 
Classical and Modern 
Sides together in a 
short period of English 
or other modern his- 
tory, read in connexion 
with contemporary 
literature or the work 
of a great historian 

In the Second and Third 
Terms, short periods 
of Greek or Roman 
history, with corre- 
sponding authors, 
along with ' outline ' 
periods from the his- 
tory of the same people 

Modern Side. — Similar 
study of French and 
German history 



Special books and 
periods, read in 
connexion Avith 
the Septuagint 
and the Greek 
Testament ; more 
especially the 
Prophets, the 
Psalms, and the 
Epistles of St. 
Paul and St . 
John, with the 
Acts of the 
Apostles 



124 ANCIENT HISTORY 

of appeal, the presence of Csesar himself. Here 
we liave ancient history of the most important 
kind — an instance of Roman imperial rule in 
actual working — with the great advantage that it 
is history read in an "original source," and that, 
literature of the highest value. 

It is now possible to conclude the first part of 
the subject with a suggested scheme of history for 
a school of the type mentioned above (see preceding 
page). 

Second Part of the Subject. 

Methods of Teaching. 

Object of Method in History. 

The method, as distinct from the organisation, 

of history teaching has been treated with special 

knowledge by the writer of the chapter on 

" Modern History." I would wish to subscribe 

fully to all that he says upon the necessity of so 

adapting one's method as to train hoys to read for 

themselves,^ and to give a clear and precise account 

of what they have read. Every subject of teaching 

has, like every form of government, a "degenerate 

half-brother" with a misshapen likeness to itself. 

The corruption of history teaching is unintelligent 

cram of unexplained "facts." 

1. 'You come here not to read, but to learn how to read,' 
Arnold used to say to the Sixth at Rugby. Stanley, c. iii. 
p. 80. 



ANCIENT HISTORY 125 

Text-eooks. 

Mr. Somervell's method of "preparatory ques- 
tions," or something very like it, is necessary to 
train boys to tlie proper use of a text-book. The 
choice of a text-book is a matter of great difficulty. 
In the preparatory stage, when we are still at 
"story" and not yet advanced to "history," we 
can, if necessary, do without one. In the inter- 
mediate stage, the first systematic survey of the 
ground, the text-book should be as short and as 
simple as possible. In Forms II. to lY. everything 
must be done to prevent the fremature introduction 
of difficulties which ought not to arise until later. 
]^o time is more grievously and fruitlessly lost in 
teaching, than that which is bestowed upon elabor- 
ately explaining to a boy at twelve what — without 
explanation — will be to him, at sixteen, as plain 
as way to parish church. In the intermediate 
stage, then, we should have a short text-book, and 
fill in details at discretion. 

Note-books. 

The boys will, of course, have note-books for 
history, even in the Second Form — note-books well 
bound and of good paper, with a wide page, not 
too closely ruled. In this they will copy maps and 
sketches from the blackboard, and will write any 



126 ANCIENT HISTORY 

fuller account of persons or things whicli their 
master may think it is judicious to give them. 

Illustrations. 

In the middle forms of a school, with boys from 
ten to fourteen, A^isible objects are scarcely of less 
importance as an aid to imagination and memory 
than at an earlier stage. It may be laid down as 
essential that no history lesson should be given 
below the Fifth Form without illustration of some 
sort, whether by way of map or plan drawn on the 
blackboard, rough colour-sketch mounted on brown 
paper and pinned conspicuously to the wall, photo- 
graph, coin (actual or fac-simile), a rubbing from 
a monumental brass or inscription, or something 
of the kind.^ 

Care needed in their Use. 
Discretion and economy are needed in the tise 

1. A museum has been started at the offices of the Teachers' 
Guild, Gower Street, W.C., where specimens of historical 
illustrations may be studied. An excellent series of boldly 
coloured pictures of striking events in European history is to 
be seen at the S.P.C.K. offices in Northumberland Avenue. 
Series of magic lantern slides have been carefully prepared by 
Messrs. G. Philip and Son, 32, Fleet Street, E.G., to illustrate 
particular text-books. A catalogue of such a set for Fyffe's 
History of Greece, with notes by the Rev. T. Field, is to be 
got from Messrs. Macmillan and Co. An organised system of 
lantern illustrations for history lessons has been worked out by 
Canon Lyttelton at Haileybury College. A beginner will find 
no lack of help in obtaining illustrations, vivid and suitable. 



ANCIENT HISTORY 127 

of illustrations. The teaclier will find that the 
simpler and more strictly relevant to the main 
point of his lesson he can make them, the greater 
will be their effect. A clear and striking picture 
or model makes an admirable starting-point for a 
lesson in history. A few questions to the form 
will insure that they are looking at the important 
points in it; a rough sketch in their own note- 
books, if the illustration be simple enough, will fix 
the gist of it still better. At each new section of 
the lesson a new illustration may appear, but it is 
well to be sparing with them, else the show may 
get the better of the substance. Photographs mean 
little or nothing to young children (with whom 
colour is a necessary element for full interest and 
understanding), but they are very useful with the 
highest forms, and to be had in abundance. 

The Line of Time. 

One indispensable piece of apparatus the boys 
will make for themselves. This is the Line of 
Time, by which the grim difficulty of " dates " is 
to be approached. Every boy should possess a 
strip of paper 2ft. 4in. in length and Sin. broad. 
Leaving a margin at each end of lin., he draws a 
line 26in. long. The right extremity of the line 
is the present moment in the present year. The 



128 ANCIENT HISTORY 

left extremity is a somewliat uncertain point in tiie 
"dim and distant" past, to which history can travel 
by means of the Egyptian monuments. As the 
line is constantly growing, like a live thing, at 
one end, and cannot be precisely fixed at the other 
('^ an island at the conflux of two eternities"), any 
boy will see that we can only measure distances on 
it by taking a point inside it to work backwards 
and forwards from. We might take any point. 
Thucydides, for instance, used the point at which 
the Peloponnesian War came to an end; the later 
Greeks that at which the first great games were 
held at Olympia ; the Eomans that at .which they 
fancied their city was founded, etc., etc. As a 
matter of fact, we now all agree to use the same 
point — that which old chronologers assigned for 
the birth of Christ. A little thought will show 
that the figure to be assigned to our measuring 
point must be, wherever we place it, 0. Allowing 
2in. to represent in space what 500 years are in 
time, we shall put our point at 7^ /gin. from the 
right extremity of our line, which will now repre- 
sent 1897 as near as may be. This will leave 
IS^/jin. to the left of our measuring point, which 
will enable us to go back 4,600 years, enough for 
practical purposes. The 2-in. points are now to be 
marked off on the line, to show periods of 500 years. 
Two inches to the right of will be 500 a.d., 2in. 



o >* 

o ffl 

Xfl 

H 
O 



— 4.600 



-4000 



Early Egyptian 
Dynasties 



— 3500 The Assyrian Monarchy 



-3000 



-2500 



-2000 About this time Abraham 
migrates to the 
Holy Land 



1000-700. About this time 
the Phoenicians trade with 776. The 
the Hellenes and teach Greeks first 
them their alphabet hold games at 
Olympia 

490. Marathon - 

390. Eome burnt by the Gauls - 

202. Zama - 

44. Julius Csesar assassinated - 

Birth of Christ - 



449. The English come into Britain 



1066, The Normans conquer England - 



1492. Columbus lands in America - 



1887. Tomkins major, natus est 



-1500 



-1000 



About this time 
leads the Hebrews 
out of Egypt 



Solomon King in 
Jerusalem 



536, The Jews return from Babylon 
-500 



< 



500 



600. Mahomet preaches in Arabia 

lOOO 

1096. The Crusades begin 



- 1453, The Turks take Constantinople 
1500 

- 1517, Luther begins the Reformation 

in Germany 



1897 



130 ANCIENT HISTORY 

to tlie left of it 500 B.C., which we may represent 
for short by —500. The first date which each boy 
is to enter on his Line of Time is his own birth, 
which, if he be ten years old, will clearly be ^/asin. 
to the left of 1897. So tiny a space he will find 
difficult to draw. All the more easy will it be for 
him to draw the moral as to the relative bulk of 
his own history and that of the rest of mankind. 
After this first date, he will add others at the 
discretion of his master. The long strip of paper 
will be gummed into the last page of his note-book, 
and neatly folded so as to fit inside its cover 
without protruding, ready for constant reference. 
A number of important advantages will flow 
from the use of some such Line of Time, as com- 
pared with that of an ordinary "Date Card." The 
comparative length of modern, mediaeval, and 
ancient history will be seen at a glance. Dates 
will no longer be isolated, but — as they ought to 
be — connected points in a continuous series. The 
analogy of the Christian era to the meridian of 
Greenwich, each denoted by the cypher 0, will 
become clear. A little practice will enable a pupil 
to "visualise " a date on the Line of Time as surely 
as he can a longitude on the map of the world. 
And just as a teacher of geography makes a habit 
of referring a sectional map to the larger one of 
which it is a part, so will the teacher of history 



ANCIENT HISTORY 131 

begin tlie study of any particular period by 
"locating" it on tbe line of universal liistory, and 
ascertaining that bis pupils know wbere tbey are 
before tbey enter upon detailed study. 

Historical Atlas, 

Anotber implement witbout wbicb bistory can- 
not intelligently be studied is a bistorical atlas. 
It does not need tbe autbority of Arnold to enforce 
tbe necessity of a clear view of tbe geograpbical 
background on wbicb tbe pictures of bistory are 
to be painted. Several bistorical atlases, fit for 
class use by tbe boys, good and cbeap, are in tbe 
market, besides tbe great works of Spruner and 
otbers, one of wbicb tbe form-master will bave by 
bim as a book of reference. 

Arrangement of Lessons. 

Tbus armed, master and boys will address tbem- 
selves to tbe plan of campaign. In tbe Middle 
Scbool, from Form II. to Form lY. inclusive, of 
wbicb we are now speaking, tbey will be able to 
count on about tbirty-tbree weeks in tbe year free 
of examinations. Tbis will give sixty-six bours 
for bistory, of wbicb ten may be set aside for re- 
capitulation. Fifty-six bours will remain for tbe 
study of new work, witb a certain proportion of 



132 ANCIENT HISTORY 

text-book allotted to each. The form of the 
individual lesson will naturally vary, but at its 
beginning will usually come a restatement by one 
or two of the boys of the main points learnt at the 
last lesson, and at the end a few minutes will be 
given to a glance at the portion of the text-book 
to be read before the next, with "preparation 
questions " as a guide to reading. The lesson itself 
will partly talve the form of an account by the boys 
of what they have read in the text-book for the 
day, and partly of an illustrated supplement by the 
master of points requiring special attention or 
explanation. Every opportunity, of course, will 
be taken of connecting the history with other parts 
of the form work, with the construing of Csesar or 
Xenophon, with the "Scripture" lesson, with 
English literature, and even with the current news 
of the day, if so fair a chance presents itself, as, 
for instance, the famous quarrel between Greece, 
Turkey, and the "Six Powers" over the future of 
Crete. 

Subject-Lessons. 

It will be well, for an occasional variety, to take a 
"subject-lesson" outside the text-book altogether. 
An excellent theme for one such is the History of 
the Alphabet. It is amusing to trace back our 
letter E through Eoman and Greek alphabets to 



ANCIENT HISTORY 133 

Phoenician, and ultimately Egyptian; the horned 
snake of the hieroglyphics is still to be recognised 
in the letters of "Western Europe. Such a lesson 
connects together hitherto isolated fields of history, 
and gives a valuable insight into the pedigree of 
modern civilisation. 

Other subjects may be "The history of some 
place-names/' " The history of titles, Kaiser, 
Czar, Emperor, Elector," etc., " Egypt and its 
conquerors, from the Persians to the English," 
etc., etc. 

Yisits to museums, or places of historical 
interest, if carefully led up to, and restricted in 
scope to a number of points of special importance, 
may be useful. 

Method in the Advanced Stage. 

In the Y. and YL Forms, Arnold's view that the 
teaching of history should be directly connected 
with the study of some great historian presents so 
many advantages that, once fairly tried, it is likely 
to be accepted for good. It concentrates attention 
upon the really fruitful periods of human history.^ 
History, unexpressed by some great writer, is 



1. ' Perioden die kein Meister beschrieb, deren Geist audi 
kein Dicliter atmet, sind der Erziehung wenig wert.' Herbart, 
quoted p. 787 of Rein's EncyMopddisches Handhuch der 
Pddagogik. 



134 ANCIENT HISTORY 

perplexed, difficult and dull; and — whatever its 
worth to the "specialist" — has little value in 
school. The study of a great historian delivers 
the form from the tyranny of the text-book, which 
at this stage takes its proper place as servant, not 
as master. It introduces boys to the material 
which lies at the back of written history, and puts 
history itself in its true light, as an investigation 
no less than a representation. By its means, boys 
are introduced, in a natural way, to the great 
questions in the study of which the chief 
excellence of school-work in history lies. What 
is the evidence for this or that statement? 
How far is the writer biassed in his judgment? 
What light is thrown upon the incident by the 
comparison of similar cases? The attempt to 
answer such questions, imperfectly as it must 
be done, even with a good Sixth Form, yet 
supplies an inestimable training. It cultivates 
that " historical sense " or power to weigh evidence 
and to realise events as a sequence which, as a 
lasting possession for life, is obviously more useful 
than any recollection of the subject-matter upon 
which the faculty was first exercised. It is one of 
the great advantages of ancient history compared 
with modern that the materials for historical 
judgment are usually of such bulk that they can 
be grasped without a vast expenditure of time. 



ANCIENT HISTORY 135 

In this way a reading, say, of Thucydicles, Book I. 
(as edited for schools by W. H. Forbes, and 
published by the Clarendon Press with reference 
to the authorities collected in the notes to Grote's 
History), will make an excellent introduction to the 
" critical " study of history. So, in a different way, 
will the study of the early books of Xenophon's 
"Hellenica." On the side of Roman History a 
splendid study of this kind is afforded by Livy, 
Book I., in Seeley's edition, along with lime's 
little book on ''Early Rome," in the ''Epochs of 
Ancient History." 

The " Comparative Method." 

Arnold's practice of studying modern history, 
also, with his Sixth, and of using, wherever 
possible, the method of comparison, e.g. as between 
the campaigns of Hannibal and Frederick the 
Great, has other good results besides that of 
delivering classical students from too narrow a 
devotion to antiquity. It is the " comparative 
method " as used by Niebuhr and others which has 
in this century thrown so great a light on all parts 
of history, but particularly on the origin and 
growth of institutions, such as the Patriciate at 
Home, and the Archonship at Athens. If one 
term out of the three be given to modern history, 



136 ANCIENT HISTORY 

the otlier two can be given to ancient. Conversely, 
on a " modern side," one term will be given to 
ancient and two to modern history. With this 
scheme, the critical study of some books of the 
Old Testament, with reference to the Septuagint 
Greek, and of the New, in the original, will work 
harmoniously enough. 

Method of Individual Lessons. 

The method, at least, in the Sixth Form, will 

approximate closely to that of the '' Lecture," and 

the boys will begin to practise the valuable art of 

taking rapid, clear, and businesslike notes. But a 

skilled form-master will take precautions to avoid 

too rigid or monotonous a procedure. The lesson 

will sometimes take the form of an investigation 

into a point of difficulty. One of the elements in 

Arnold's teaching which evidently impressed his 

pupils most was that he himself was for ever 

learning. He would constantly send for books of 

reference and " hunt up " what he wanted to find, 

taking care to express his pleasure at discovering 

something new or correcting a misapprehension of 

his own. 

Essays, etc. 

Sometimes essays will be set on points of history 
that will need research in the school library. And 
the Debating Society will often lead to lively 
historical discussion. Controversy of any sort, if 



ANCIENT HISTORY 137 

only interesting enongli, is an effective spur to 
study. Was Catiline a desperado or a maxtyr? 
Did Mary Queen of Scots really write the casket 
letters? Was the assassination of Caesar a crime 
as well as a blunder? Such ancient problems are 
new to boys, who readily take sides in such matters, 
and ihej will not be worse judges later on for 
having begun by playing the advocate. A world 
of fascinating reading opens before them as soon 
as they have knowledge and experience enough to 
take interest in the theory of government. Selec- 
tions from Aristotle's "Politics," chapters from 
Maine's "Ancient Law," and Bagehot's "Physics 
and Politics " ; Mill on " Pepresentative Govern- 
ment" and "Liberty," Macaulay's Essays on the 
"Utilitarian Theory of Politics," have a strong 
attraction for "politically minded" people in their 
last year of school, and will lead to more reading 
afterwards. 

Text-books. 

For periods studied in "outline" a text-book will 
be used, and happily the choice of such for the Y. 
and YI. is larger and better than for the lower 
forms. But the style of some is unfortunate. 
The influence of Mommsen has had an unhappy 
result — predicted by Freeman — on the way in 
which some of the great figures of Roman history, 
Pompey, and Cicero, and Cato, are habitually 



138 ANCIENT HISTORY 

written and spoken of. '' The poisonous tendency 
to modernise " lias also led to a custom of making 
the Romans and Greeks serve as texts for homilies 
on details of politics or morals. But there are still 
text-books to be found that are free from such 
faults, and are written in a style not unworthy of 
the heroic dignity of their subject. 

The tradition of Arnold is not extinct, and there 
are schools in England in which a master's 
enthusiasm for history communicates a lasting 
love of the study to his pupils. It is a saying of 
Stevenson's^ that "to be wholly devoted to some 
intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life." 
To this form of success careful teaching in history 
is at least as likely to lead as that in any other 
subject. 

1. In TFeir of Hermiston. 

Note on the Literature of the Subject. 

I have been able to find little in English on the theory of 
history teaching except the section in Fitch's Lectures. There 
is an American volume in the ' International Education ' series, 
by Hinsdale, on ' How to study and teach History,' but it 
contains little that will help English readers. The volume of 
essays on ' Methods of Teaching and Studying History,' in the 
' Pedagogical Library, ed. by G. Stanley Hall (2nd edition, 
published Boston, 1896), contains one or two helpful papers. 
' Studies in Historical ]Method,' by INIary Sheldon Barnes 
(Isbister, 1897), is enthusiastic. It contains a full bibliography 
of American literature on the subject. There appears to be no 
recognised authority on the subject in French. The German 
literature is, of course, abundant. The article in Rein's 
' Encyklopadisches Handbuch der Padagogik ' gives a full 
account of it. I have got most from Oskar Jager's article 
' Geschichte ' in the ' Handbuch der Erziehungs- und Unter- 
richtslehre' and the same writer's 'Bemerkungen iiber den 
geschichtlichen Unterricht. ' 



Nineteenth Century 
History Teaching 



THE TEACHING OF HISTORY IN 

ENGLAND IN THE 

NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

[A lecture delivered at the Cambridge University Extension 
Summer Meeting, August, 1900.] 

Analysis. (1) Connexion of the subject of the Lecture with 
the central topic of the Summer Meeting, "Life and Thought 
in England in the Nineteenth Century " — (2) The ' historical 
method ' and the 'liistorical sense ' distinguish this century from 
the ' a priori ' philosophy and the unsympathetic treatment of 
the past which marked the Eighteenth — Examples of this 
tendency in the Theory of Government, in Theology, and in 
Literature and Art — The idea of de'velojyment the central idea 
in the thought of this century — (3) At the opening of the 
century the striking feature of the studies of our Universities 
and Public Schools was, with certain exceptions, the supremacy 
of the single classical curriculum, as instituted at the Revival 
of Learning — This contained 'implicit History,' although 
History was not taught as a separate 'subject' — (4^ The 
Nineteenth Century is marked by the break-up of the single 
curriculum — History emerges as a substantive subject — 
attempt of Thomas Arnold to preserv^e unity in the scheme of 
a liberal education — History the central subject in his system 
of practice, as it was in Herbart's system of theory — (5) The 
last third of the century sees ' specialisation ' dominate our 
studies — The treatment of History in every grade of our 
schools is unsatisfactory — (6) The great requisite for the pro- 
gress of our education in the Twentieth Century is a simpler 
and clearer idea of a liberal education — Place of History in 
this idea. 



It is sometimes made a point of objection to 
meetings snch as the one that we are all attending 
during these weeks at Cambridge, that the lectures 



142 NINETEENTH CENTURY 

delivered at them are upon topics so various and 
so many tKat tlie effect is mainly to bewilder and 
to distract. The student, it is said, goes from 
discourses on Dante and the IS'ebular Hypothesis in 
the morning, to addresses on Bacteriology and the 
Music of Richard Wagner in the afternoon. His 
hasty and rather puzzled pilgrimages from one 
quarter of the town to another are, according to 
our critics, a fit symbol of his wandering attention ; 
and the farrago of his note-book is a picture of the 
confusion of his mind. Such a criticism may have 
an element of truth in it, although it is based on 
an exaggerated disbelief in the power of the mind 
to' deal with and to arrange the material which the 
mind receives. But we may claim that the 
Syndicate has on this occasion provided us with a 
core of thought round which we may group our 
ideas, and so has given a certain unity of action to 
our drama. "Life and Thought in England in the 
Nineteenth Century" is our unifying conception, 
in relation to which we are to arrange all the 
multiplicity of our notions on the many subjects 
of our Time-Table. It is a historical conception 
and therefore in intimate connexion with the 
special subject of my own lecture, which is that of 
the Teaching of History. 

History in its widest sense is perhaps the most 
characteristic form of intellectual activity in the 



HISTORY TEACHING 143 

nineteentK century. Incalculable as lias been tke 
influence of the study of the natural sciences, it 
may be doubted wbetber after all the influence of 
history in all its different forms has not been 
greater still upon the life of the nation. 

If one contrasts roughly the prominent type of 
mind towards the close of the eighteenth century 
with the prominent type in our own generation, 
one may question whether any difi^erence goes quite 
so near the centre as this, namely, that in the 
eighteenth century the historical sense was in a 
great degree absent or undeveloped. Take the 
chief spheres of national life and compare them, 
then and now. In the theory of government and 
law the eighteenth century dealt with its 
problems abstractly and metaphysically. Yoltaire, 
Eousseau, Montesquieu, working out the sugges- 
tions of Hobbes, produced a yriori doctrines on the 
nature of Sovereignty, on the Social Contract, on 
the Eights of Man, which were completely un- 
historical in character. In England they had their 
counterpart in Bentham and the Utilitarian 
School. These theories profoundly influenced the 
great final movement of that century, the French 
Eevolution, which was an organised attempt to 
abolish the history of a nation, and to create a new 
regime in a vacuum. On the other hand, the 
nineteenth century has seen the Theory of Govern- 



144 NINETEENTH CENTURY 

ment put upon a historical basis. Here, in 
Cambridge, Sir Henry Maine in his famous work 
on Ancient Laiv, and many other jurists have 
worked out the comparative study of politics and 
the origins of political ideas, and have given us the 
new conception of the State as a growth from 
primitive conditions and customs, a growth which, 
if it is to be healthy, must be gradual and con- 
tinuous. The practical politics of the century have 
confirmed this historical conception : those elements 
of the national life which a priori philosophy in 
Erance had sought to abolish by decree — the 
Monarchy, the Nobility, the Church — have proved 
to be living forces, which the new regime has to 
struggle with in a bitter war, whereof the issue at 
this moment hangs in the balance after frightful 
reverses and frightful victories for one side and 
the other. By contrast, in England the principal 
institutions of the State are in a position to-day of 
far greater security than a hundred years ago, 
because they are seen in a historical perspective, 
and their defence is based not upon logic but upon 
prescription. 

The same general difference between the two 
centuries is observable in points of theology and 
religious practice. The Tractarian Movement in 
the second quarter of this century and the Biblical 
Criticism of its third and fourth quarters are of 



HISTORY TEACHING 145 

a strikingly different cliaracter from tlie Wesleyan 
movement or the Deistic Controversy of the 
eighteenth century; and the distinction may be 
most shortly expressed by saying that in the 
eighteenth century the main appeal is to a priori 
arguments and to religious or philosophical dogma, 
while in the nineteenth it is to history and to the 
historical method that the disputants turn for their 
weapons. 

So, also, in Literature and Art, the Romantic 
Movement which marks the beginning of this 
century and is associated with the names of 
Wordsworth and Walter Scott, and the later 
Pre-Raphaelite movement led by Rossetti, and 
Holman Hunt, and Millais, and supported in 
certain aspects by Ruskin, originated in a return 
to earlier models and in sympathies which we may 
call historical. Similar influences have inspired 
our architects and our house furnishers : Pugin 
and Gilbert Scott and William Morris have 
gradually altered our national taste by taking us 
back to medieval examples. In the Drama we 
have at least so far acquired the historical sense 
that we should not be able to tolerate a Macbeth 
in the guise in which David Garrick presented 
him — a perruque and silk stockings, conspiring 
with his lady in a hooped skirt and a turban. 
Even in history itself, the whole tone and 



146 NINETEENTH CENTURY 

atmospliere have clianged. Tlie mighty work of 
Gibbon, however accurate in mere statements of 
fact, is falsified by a lack of historical sense and 
historical sympathy, such as incapacitated him 
from understanding either the early Christian 
Church or the life of the Middle Ages, One has 
only to compare liim with Ernest Renan to see 
the gulf that divides history as we conceive it 
now, from the unimaginative and unsympathetic 
treatment which it received 120 years ago. So 
also our entire conception of the nature of language 
has been revolutionised within this century by a 
study of its history and by the consequent discovery 
at the hands of Schlegel of the Indo-European 
family of tongues, and of the cousinship of 
English, and Greek, and Sanskrit. Even the 
greatest scientific generalisation of the century — 
the theoiy of evolution — in a sense belongs to, and 
has itself profoundly affected, the realm of history, 
since it reveals the long process of infintely slow 
development by which animal and plant life have 
come to be what they are. It is, in fact, the idea 
of development, the central idea of history, which, 
more than any other single idea, characterises the 
thought of the nineteenth century. 

Ours then is the century of development, the 
century of history. It is in accord with this fact 
that we find that the study of history as a separate 



HISTORY TEACHING 147 

subject in our Public Schools and Universities first 
emerges during this period. It would not indeed 
be true to say that History was not taugbt at all 
before 1800. The Professorships of Modern 
History at Oxford and Cambridge were founded 
as long ago as 1724 by George I. But these 
foundations seem to have produced no striking 
result either in the shape of original research or 
of influence upon University, studies until the 
present century. The University of Oxford rather 
resented the endowment as a Whig political move. 
"Not Only," says Dr. Stubbs, "did they acknow- 
ledge the receipt of the King's letter in a most 
contemptuous way, forwarding their letter of 
thanks by a bedell, but, when by due pressure and 
by the example of Ca,mbridge compelled to send 
a formal answer by a deputation to the King, 
clothed it in such words as showed that the 
introduction of the new study was looked on as 
an unwarranted interference with the educational 
Government of the place." And it is quite certain 
that no holder of the Professorship down to the 
time of Dr. Nares in the early years of this century 
did anything to overcome the sullen suspicion with 
which the foundation of the chair was first 
receiA^ed. At Cambridge the only one of the Poyal 
Professors of Modern History during last century 
whose name is remembered in this was the Poet 



148 NINETEENTH CENTURY 

Gray. So again in regard to the Public Schools 
it would not be exact to say that there is no trace 
of History having been taught a hundred years 
ago. Thus Dr. James, who was Headmaster of 
Rugby from 1TT8 to 1794, used to devote the first 
lesson of the week, which began at seven o'clock in 
the morning, to the subject of Scripture History 
varied in a regular cycle with Goldsmith's Homan 
History and the History of England. This was, 
however, only the case with the Fifth and Sixth 
Forms. I cannot find that History was taught 
in the lower part of the school. And the single 
hour before breakfast given at Eugby appears to 
have been wholly exceptional. I have not been 
able to discover anything similar at Eton, Harrow, 
or Winchester. Even at Rugby one could hardly 
say that History formed a part of the regular 
curriculum. So that, speaking broadly, we may 
say that History as a separate subject formed no 
part of the course of studies at the Universities 
and Public Schools in the year 1800. On the 
other hand, the curriculum, such as it was, 
embodied some of the most important facts of 
European History between the age of Pericles and 
the Revival of Learning, and formed in itself a 
historical document or relic of an extraordinarily 
interesting kind. The classical curriculum of our 
Universities and Schools which continued until 



HISTORY TEACHING 149 

well on into this century, practically iinclianged, 
was itself in its origin a. result of a movement for 
reform, a movement which like those of our own 
time assumed the shape of an appeal to the past 
and a return to earlier models. The history of 
intellectual progress is marked by a series of 
revolts against systems of education, in which the 
human spirit seeks to save itself from being 
strangled in formularies of its own making, by 
struggling back to a more primitive and less 
complex stage in its own development, by 
appealing from the Rabbis to Moses, from the 
Aristotelians to Aristotle, from the Fathers to the 
Apostles. Such a revolt was the substitution of 
the great classic writers for the works of the 
Schoolmen, a revolt consummated in England in 
the sixteenth century. Perhaps the essential 
advantage of this change was that it put in the 
hands of schoolboys and students books which, 
directly or indirectly, contained the history of 
Mediterranean Europe at its highest point of 
culture. Scholasticism, as was natural from its 
deductive methods, had no place in its curriculum 
for history; classicism, although it did not teach 
history as a specific subject, yet offered its students 
historical material of the most precious kind. 
Thus while it is true that in 1700 history was to all 
appearances no more recognised as a part of the 



150 NINETEENTH CENTURY 

ciirricuKim at Oxford or at Wincliester tlian it had 
been in 1500, yet we must remember tbat at this 
later date our ablest scholars read, as a matter of 
course, tbe great masterpieces of Ancient History 
as well as tbe great Poets whose works illustrated 
— as nothing else could illustrate — the history of 
the age in which they wrote. Thus we may speak 
of the classical curriculum as Implicit History, 
because it contained in itself, not consciously 
disengaged from literature, a mass of historical 
material. 

At the close of the eighteenth century, however, 
classicism had in effect fallen too completely into 
the hands of the commentator and the versifier, 
and the subject-matter of the great classic writers 
had ceased to be studied with the enthusiasm of 
the sixteenth-century scholars. The intellectual 
life of our Schools and Universities was torpid and 
unproductive to the last degree ; the great stimulus 
of the Revival of Learning had spent its force. 
It may even be doubted whether Oxford at the 
very close of the scholastic period was quite so 
profoundly asleep as she was towards the close 
of the classical period. '' For a moment," says 
Mr. Rashdall in his great book on the Universities 
of Europe in the Middle Ages, " for a moment 
the human world was brought into real and living 
contact with a new world of thought and action by 



HISTORY TEACHING 151 

tlie ' 'New Learning ' : but ere long classical 
education in turn beca,me arid and scholastic — as 
remote from fruitful contact with realities— as the 
education of the Middle Ages. The history of 
Education is, indeed, a somewhat melancholy 
record of misdirected energy, stupid routine, and 
na,rrow one-sidedness. It seems to be only at rare 
moments in the history of the human mind that 
an enthusiasm for knowledge and a many-sided 
interest in the things of the intellect stirs the 
dull waters of educational commonplace. What 
was a revelation to one generation becomes an 
unintelligent routine to the next. Considered as 
mere intellectual training, it may be doubted 
whether the superiority of a classical education, 
as it was understood at the beginning of this 
century, to that of the medieval Schools was quite 
so great as is commonly supposed. If in the 
scholastic age the human mind did not advance, 
even Macaulay admits that it did at least mark 
time. The. study of Aristotle and the schoolmen 
must have been a better training in subtlety and 
precision of thought than the exclusive study of a 
few poets and orators." 

If you carry your mind from 1800 to 1900 and 
survey the period between you will see that the 
significance of this century in the history of the 
higher education is that the single uniform 



152 NINETEENTH CENTURY 

curricukim of the classics whicli, with certain 
modifications (as for instance the great attention 
given in Cambridge to mathematical studies) had 
been handed down jnst as it was from the age of 
the Henaissance, has been broken up, that alterna- 
tive schemes of study have been admitted side by 
side with the classics, and that even where the 
classics remain the chief staple of the intellectual 
training given, other subjects, in particular 
mathematics, history and m.odern languages and a 
little natural science have been superadded. The 
unity of the curriculum in the places of higher 
learning has been, for the time at any rate, lost 
and the era of specialisation has begun. The full 
effect of this immense revolution in our education 
is but little grasped by any of us as yet. However 
we are not here concerned with the general theory 
and history of our higher curriculum but with the 
fortunes of a single portion of it. 

The great impulse which the Eomantic Move- 
ment in Literature led by Sir Walter Scott gave 
to the study of History took effect in general 
literature, in private reading and in private 
schools, more particularly in schools for Girls, 
some time before it touched the general body of 
the public schools. In the second third of the 
century, Thomas Carlyle and Macaulay began to 
exercise their prodigious influence over the 



HISTORY TEACHING 153 

Englisli middle classes, an influence wtticli lias 
perhaps done more than any other single cause to 
familiarise the national mind with historical 
images and historical ideas. Neither can be called 
a professed teacher of history. Macanlay declined 
the Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge 
when the Prince Consort offered it to him, and 
Carlyle lectured, not at a University, but by way 
of private venture, in the Portman Eooms in 
London. He gave four series of historical lectures 
—in 1837, 38, 39, and 40. In this last year his 
subject was Heroes and Hero-worship, and this 
was the only series of the four that he ever wrote 
out and printed. It is with Thomas Arnold that 
the systematic teaching of History in our public 
schools begins. His headmaster ship at R^igby 
lasted from 1829 to 1842. His peculiar glory in 
the records of our education is that whereas, when 
he came to Hugby, he found on one side a society 
of Boys with a strange corporate life of their own 
with games, institutions, and laws of a spontaneous 
and irregular growth, and on the other side 
a system of instruction and religious training 
entirely without relation to or influence upon that 
corporate life, he contrived to fuse every part of 
the school energies into a unity with a central 
purpose. The self-goA^erning commonwealth of 
the Boys themselves he retained and confirmed, 



154 NINETEENTH CENTURY 

with, certain modincations, but this common- 
wealtL. was to be so truly ordered as to train its 
members to take afterwards an active part in the 
life of tlie larger conimonwealtK of Cburcb and 
State ; tlie instruction wbetber religious or secular 
was to interpenetrate and to illumine tlie life of 
this commonwealth by introducing the boys to the 
history of other such communities and to the great 
literatures ancient and modern by which the ideas 
of those communities at their best, have been 
interpreted and expressed. In Arnold's concep- 
tion, the English gentleman must not only learn 
to rule and to be ruled, and to play football and to 
speak the truth, but he must also understand the 
history of his country and the history of Christen- 
dom, and the literature of Grreece and Rome, which 
along with the sacred books of the Hebrews lies at 
the foundation of Christendom. The unity of 
education, the unity of history are his moving 
ideas; and we shall fall short indeed of the true 
estimation of Arnold's work for the study of 
history, if we confine it to such matters as his 
co-ordination of geography with history, his 
constant use of the blackboard in historical 
instruction, his comparative method of treating 
ancient and naodern history, or even to the 
admirably devised cycle of historical lessons which 
he embodied in his school curriculum. Infinitely 



HISTORY TEACHING 155 

more important tlian all these important things 
was the clearness with which he himself appre- 
hended and taught others to apprehend, the 
bearing of literature and of history upon life, and 
of life, in its turn, upon literature and history. 
He thus put upon an entirely new basis the claim 
of the old classical curriculum to furnish the best 
training for the modern Englishman. Our inner- 
most intellectual and spiritual life, our laws, 
politics, religion are charged with forces which we 
cannot understand nor wisely deal with unless we 
study them in the light of the single continuous 
historical process by which they have come to be 
what they are. Arnold therefore, like Herbart, 
concentrates and unifies his curriculum; but he 
does far more, he concentrates and unifies the 
whole of human life; the core of his circle of 
studies is active Christian citizenship, and their 
proportionate value depends upon the degree in 
which they help to make that citizenship 
intelligent and earnest. 

Arnold's influence as a teacher of History was, 
of course, not confined to his work at Eugby. In 
the last two years of his life, 1841 and 42, he held 
the office of Professor of Modern History at Oxford 
and, short as his tenure of the chair was, he roused 
the greatest interest and enthusiasm by his 
lectures, and placed the study of History in a 



156 NINETEENTH CENTURY 

position of importance which it had never held 
before. He also profoundly affected the views of 
his successors and likewise of those who held the 
corresponding Professorship at Cambridge. Edward 
Freeman at Oxford and Charles Kingsley at 
Cambridge in very different ways continued to 
expound the views of Arnold. The famous saying 
that " History is past Politics, and Politics are 
present History " was one of the sides of his 
teaching upon which they laid most stress, and 
which in the last quarter of this century Seeley 
made the central idea of his work as Professor at 
Cambridge, in this slightly altered form, ^'With- 
out History, Politics has no root ; without Politics, 
History has no fruit." This was a view which, to 
some minds, appeared to have its dangers, and 
there arose in opposition to it a school which 
demanded that History should be regarded as a 
purely abstract antiquarian subject, and that the 
bearing of the past upon the present should — as a 
possible cause of prejudice and partisanship — be 
strictly kept out of its judicial investigations. Of 
this school Bishop Stubbs, who was appointed 
Professor at Oxford in 1867, has been the most 
distinguished representative in England. Under 
the influence of men of this way of thinking the 
eiforts of historical students were bent specially to 
discover the exact and minute truth before any 



HISTORY TEACHING 157 

inferences slionld be made from it. Time forbids 
US to do more tlian mention the immense services 
performed by tbis scbool of historians and by tbe 
Public Offices which under their inspiration have, 
both in England and abroad, issued copies of 
ancient documents, characters, and records such as 
have revolutionised our ideas more particularly of 
the Middle Ages. 

This split of the historians into the political 
school and the antiquarian school was followed by 
further subdivisions. Social life and customs, 
details of dress, household furniture and the like 
and all that we vaguely include under Archaeology 
or Anthropology, had a greater attraction for 
some scholars than the history of political or 
municipal institutions, and we have seen arise in 
this last third of the century a School of 
Archaeologists which by its excavations and 
researches have reconstructed before our eyes the 
minutest details of ancient domestic life. One 
might pursue this process of specialisation and 
subdivision into many other branches, but it is 
enough to say that the study of History has 
become a general name for several groups of 
highly differentiated scholars who work exclusively 
at special sides of the whole historical field. 

The consequence of this has been one, which is, 
in a way, a direct contradiction of the view of 



158 NINETEENTH CENTURY 

Arnold. It has been thonglit necessary to divide 
History from Literature, and to make it a parallel 
and as it were alternative subject. A special 
Tripos in History was established by a Grace at 
Cambridge in 1873 and the first examination was 
hekl in 1875. A similar step had been taken some 
years before at Oxford, where, however, for some 
time the school of history was combined with the 
school of law. Henceforth, at both Universities, 
it became possible to graduate in History, as an 
alternative to Mathematics or Classics. 

The general upshot of this was a curious one. 
"We have seen that, up to the time of Arnold, 
History was practically not taught as a subject at 
our Public Schools and Universities. His influence, 
however, was so great, and was backed by such an 
overwhelming weight of social opinion that 
History came to be studied more or less thoroughly 
at both one and the other. This process was, 
however, an exceedingly gradual one. When the 
Public School Commissioners published their 
report in 1864, it was still the case at Winchester 
that neither '^ ancient nor modern history is 
taught in set lessons, and ancient history does not 
enter as a separate subject into any of the school 
examinations." " I wish," says Dr. Moberly, the 
Head Master, to the Commissioners, " we could 
teach more history; but as to teaching it in set 



HISTORY TEACHING 159 

lessons, 7 should not know how to do it." It is 
worth while to compare with, this remark of the 
good Doctor's a passage in Mr. A. F. Leach's 
History of Winchester College, where, describing 
the extreme aridity and dulness of the purely 
classical studies, even in the Sixth Form, he says 
that the one or two exceptions to this dnlness live 
in his memory : as for instance when one day in 
the year 1866, Dr. Moberly came into the room 
and told them that war had been declared between 
Prussia and Austria. He delighted the boys by 
giving them a vivid account of the relations of 
those two powers in the past, and of the circum- 
stances which had brought on the war, and he 
wound up by hazarding the prophecy that the war 
would perhaps last the lifetime of some of them. 
As a matter of fact the war was over in six weeks. 
This was just two years after Dr. Moberly had 
said that he should not know how to teach set 
lessons in history. 

This entire absence of the set teaching of 
History at Winchester in 1864 may be compared 
with the account of the elaborate system of 
teaching of the subject, as now conducted there, 
given on pp. 220, 221 of the Report of the 
ATnerican Committee of Seven on the Study of 
History in Schools. 

Similar particulars might be given with regard 



160 NINETEENTH CENTURY 

to other Public Schools, but the main point is that 
whereas in the first third of the century, history 
was scarcely taught at all, and that in the second 
third it was introduced into Rugby by Arnold, 
and elsewhere by his pupils and followers, as for 
instance by Yaughan at Harrow, in the third 
section of the century it practically became 
universal in Schools, in one form or other, and 
was made a Special subject at the Universities as 
one of the alternative avenues to a Degree in Arts. 

The specialist character given by this change at 
the Universities to the study of History seriously 
threatens its position as a part of a liberal 
education. Arnold's view was, as we have seen, 
that History was essential to a comprehension 
alike of literature and of life, and must 
indispensably be taught in appropriate shapes to 
every class of the School. 

On the other hand, the recent view tends to the 
specialist conception, namely, that History is one 
of a number of options which a boy may choose 
between, as soon, at any rate, as he reaches the 
age of 15 or 20. While the classical specialist is 
doing Greek Iambics, the history specialist is 
reading Mommsen and Stubbs, and the mathe- 
matical specialist is doing the Binomial Theorem 
or Trigonometry. 

An exactly similar conception prevailed until 



HISTORY TEACHING 161 

this very year 1900, in the Primary Schools. 
History was an option which might be taken or 
left at the discretion of the schoolmaster, with the 
further provision that it must not be taken if any 
two other class subjects were selected. Thus if 
Geography and English Grammar were taught at 
any Elementary School, ipso facto History was 
excluded. 

This extraordinary view of knowledge — that you 
can cut it into slices like a melon, and that it is 
unwholesome for any one person to take more than 
two or three of these slices for himself, has 
practically destroyed within the present century 
the idea of an " all-round '^ liberal education in 
England. That idea does not exist at our 
Universities; it does not exist at our Public 
Schools; it does perhaps exist, though precariously, 
at some of the Girls' High Schools, through the 
introduction of the Block Grant in this present 
year of grace. 

But at the moment we see the paradoxical result 
that the emergence of History as a distinct subject 
from Literature, so far from securing it a safe 
place in the curriculum of a general education, 
threatens to relegate it to the limbo of alternative 
specialisms, along with Organic Chemistry and the 
Integral Calculus. Poor Clio ! scarcely had she 
once more taken her place among the Muses, 



162 NINETEENTH CENTURY 

welcomed by her sisters of Poetry and Science, 
tlian she and the rest of them are torn from the 
lovely group in which they moved with arms 
intertwined, and shut up by the grim inquisitors 
of mysterious Examination Boards, into separate 
compartments, where, in spite of their shrieks, they 
are cut up into subdivisions, such as archaeology, 
palaeography, anthropology, epigraphy, and I 
know not what. Every subdivision is carefully 
dried into mummy, and then labelled Part I. 
Division II. of Subject xxxiii. (c) in some 
University Calendar. 

We all of us know the forces which have relent- 
lessly driven us in this direction. The difficulty is 
truly a great one. The field of knowledge has 
been extended and deepened during the last 
75 years to a degree unparalleled in the previous 
history of mankind, and the question how to give 
a general education which shall be at once wide 
and at the same time not superficial, has been 
made immensely more complicated. It is to that 
question, on the solution of which our intellectual 
vitality in the future more than on any other 
depends, that we shall have to address ourselves 
in the twentieth century. I venture to think that 
Herbart in theory, and Arnold in practice, have 
done much to suggest the practicable solution. 
We must lighten our curricula not by throwing 



HISTORY TEACHING 163 

away this or that indispensable limb of the organic 
unity of knowledge, but by making those curricula 
consciously represent that unity, by showing the 
organic connection of their different parts and 
obliging each subject to play into the hands of all. 
When we seriously set ourselves to carry out that 
task, we shall find that history, in its widest sense, 
as the record of the process by which man has 
come to be what he is, already furnishes a subject 
by means of which it will be possible to correlate 
the various aspects of knowledge, as they have 
in positive fact been correlated in the gradual 
upward progress of humanity. 



History in 
Elementary Schools 



MEMORANDUM ON THE TEACH- 
ING OF HISTORY IN THE 
SCHOOLS OF THE LONDON 
SCHOOL BOARD (1901).* 

It lias become necessary to consider afresh tlie 
way in wliicli History should be taught in Public 
Elementary Schools. This necessity arises out of 
the alterations made last year in the fifteenth 
Article of the Day School Code, affecting the 
relations hitherto subsisting between the course 
of instruction and the method of allotting the 
Parliamentary Grant. 

I. Position, up to 1900, of the subject of History 
IN THE Public Elementary School. 

Up to 1900 History has been one of a number 
of " Class Subjects " on two of which (but not more 

* Note. — The following pages contain the condensed results 
of much consultation and study. The writer has to thank 
Mr. M. E. Sadler and his staff in the Department of Special 
Enquiries at the Board of Education for access to documents 
relating to schemes of History Teaching in use abroad. Grateful 
acknowledgment must also be made of the ready and valuable 
assistance given, both orally and in writing, by officers and 
teachers in the service of the School Board for London, as well 
as by personal friends of the writer. 



168 HISTORY IN 

tlian two), grants might be claimed in respect of 
the scholars of a class, provided they reached a 
satisfactory level of attainment. Thus History 
has not hitherto been an obligatory subject in 
English Elementary Schools : it has been one out 
of a number of alternate subjects. Among these 
alternatives it has been the least popular. Eefer- 
ence to the opening pages of the " Eeport of the 
School Management Committee of the School 
Board for London for the year ended at Lady-day, 
1899," shows that in that year out of a total number 
of 834 school departments under the Board's 
management which presented children in class 
subjects, only 158 presented History. The figures 
are much more striking if the number of children — 
not the number of departments — is considered. 
The total average ^ attendance on which grants for 
various class subjects were allowed was 522,680, 
while the average attendance in classes earning 
grant for History was only 20,765 — that is, just 
about four children out of every hundred took 
History as a class subject. 

The corresponding figures for England and 
Wales at large are as follows : the number of 
school departments taking class subjects in the 

1. N.B. — The figures quoted above are the last available, but 
they represent an incomplete report. The figures (complete) 
for the year 1898 are 26,761 out of 581,976, or less than five per 
cent, taking History. 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 169 

year 1898-99 was 23,041. Out of this total, 21,882 
took up Object Lessons, 17.049 took Geography, 
13,456 took English, and only 5,780 took History. 
[Report of the Committee of Council on Education, 
England and Wales, 1899.] It has no doubt been 
the case in many schools, in which History has 
not been presented as a class subject, that never- 
theless, lessons in History have been given. And 
in every school without exception the rule has 
held good that out of the three reading books in 
every class above the Second Standard ^ one has 
been a " History Eeader." But the broad fact 
remains that systematic instruction in History has 
not been obligatory in English Elementary 
Schools, and that it has been given to only a small 
percentage of the total number of scholars. In 
these points there has been a contrast between our 
schools and those of every other civilised nation 
in the world, so far as I am aware. 

II. Relation of History to the re-organised 
Curriculum of our Schools. 

It is clear from these figures that History may, 
for practical purposes, be called a new subject in 
our schools. Is it to be added, over and above, to 
the old curriculum? If so, how are time and 

1. Vide Footnote to Schedule I. at the end of the Day 
School Code. 



170 



HISTORY IN 



energy to be found for it, without over-pressure 
both for scholars and teachers ? 

This question makes it necessary to consider the 
whole course of instruction as re-modelled under 
the new system of awarding grants. 

Section (h) of Article 15 in the Day School Code 
now reads as follows : — 

" The course of instruction in schools for older^ 
scholars is as follows: — 



(i) English, by which is to be under- ~"i 
stood Reading, Recitation, Writ- 
ing, Composition and Grammar, 
in so far as it bears upon the 
correct use of language. 

Arithmetic. 

Drawing — for Boys. 

' Needlework — for Girls. 

Lessons, including object lessons, 
on Geography, History, and 
Common Things. 

■ Singing, which should as a rule be 
by note. 

■Physical Exercises." 



To be 

taken as a 
rule in all 
schools." 



After these subjects, which are " to be taken as 
a rule in all schools," there follows, in paragraphs 



1. " Older scholars" — i.e., above the Infant School. 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 171 

numbers (ii.) and (iii-)j a list of optional special 
subjects, " to be taken wben tbe circumstances of 
the school, in the opinion of the Inspector, make it 
desirable." 

A note is added to paragraph (i.), that " it is not 
necessary that all these subjects should be taught 
in every class. One or more of them may be 
omitted in any school which can satisfy the 
department that there is good reason in its case for 
the omission." 

The latter part of this note refers, no doubt, to 
schools working under peculiar difficulties of 
staffing and so forth, and not to any school under 
the management of the School Board of London. 

It is clear, therefore, that in the subjects 
grouped together as " to be taken as a rule in all 
schools," the Code presents us with a summary of 
the education which, in the opinion of the Board 
of Education, ought to be given to every child who 
passes through the Public Elementary Schools; 
while in paragraphs (ii.) and (iii.) certain 
desirable subjects are added which should be 
taught in the higher classes, if they can be so 
taught without detriment to the indispensable 
subjects named above. 

Paragraph (i.) gives us, in a word, the 
irreducible minimum of a liberal education; that 
amount of things which everyone, whatever his 



172 HISTORY IN 

special occupation is to be, ought to be trained to 
know or to do, as a free man. 

It is of extreme importance to keep tbis view of 
tbe matter clearly in mind, because elementary- 
education, tbus regarded, bas a unity and 
simplicity wbicb are otherwise only too easily lost 
sigbt of. If we add religious knowledge (wbicb 
tbe Code leaves, conditionally, in tbe bands of 
scbool managers) we bave it as our aim in tbe 
Elementary Scbools to impart to every scbolar 
sucb a training in tbe knowledge of God, of man- 
kind, and of nature as will at least save bim from 
being a loss and a danger to bimself and to otbers. 
If tbere is time to go f urtber, so mucb tbe better, 
but to go tbus far is indispensable. 

Tbe result of tbe previous system was to divide 
and to complicate tbe course of instruction : tbe 
result of tbe recent reform sbould be to restore 
unity and coberence to it. Disconnectedness and 
scrappiness were tbe consequences of awarding 
grants on separate '' subjects." ISTow tbat grant is 
to be given for education as a wbole, it will be 
possible to arrange a course on lines at once 
simpler and wider. 

Tbe purpose of elementary education being to 
enable a man to act intelligently for bimself and 
otbers in tbe world in wbicb be finds bimself — to 
''adapt bimself," as tbe pbrase goes, ''to bis 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 173 

environment " — tlie inclusion of " History " in tlie 
course ought not to be considered as the addition 
of a new subject; it ought rather to mean an 
explanation of the essential facts and forces in the 
condition of mankind as it is now, and as it has 
been in the past, an explanation which will serve 
to put a man into intelligent relations towards the 
community of which he is to be a member. So 
little ought this to be felt as an addition to the 
curriculum, that, if properly carried out, it ought 
to lessen the difficulty of the remainder of the 
course, and to throw light upon what would other- 
wise be perplexing and unintelligible. In other 
words, it ought to arise quite naturally out of the 
other "subjects," it ought to answer questions 
suggested by the study of the mother tongue, or 
of Geography, or of the actual living world. 

The scholars in our schools are already brought 
necessarily into contact with a considerable 
quantity of historical material. The Scriptures of 
the Old Testament cannot be studied intelligently 
without some rudimentary knowledge of the 
ancient empires of Egypt, Assyria, and Persia, for 
the history of the Hebrews is, to a great degree, 
an account of their relations with those empires. 
The story of the Gospels and of the Acts of the 
Apostles requires no less clearly some summary 
notions about the Greeks, in whose language the 



174 HISTORY IN 

New Testament was written, and about the 
Eomans under whose government Christianity was 
founded and spread. A study of Geography, of 
the chief races of mankind and their territories, 
cannot be undertaken rationally without the 
accompaniment of an outline of their history. 
English Literature and Language are obscure 
indeed without constant illumination from the 
History of England and of Christendom. And the 
events of our own time, with which the older 
children are familiarised through common talk 
and the newspapers, suggest a thousand points of 
contact with the events which stirred their fore- 
fathers to a pitch of patriotic feeling equal to their 
own. 

All this material is already to hand : it should 
be the aim of the lessons in History to organise it, 
to arrange it clearly, to connect one part of it with 
another, and to put the scholars in possession of 
such information as will enable them, if they wish 
to do so, to pursue the study of the subject after 
they shall have left school. 

The very wholesome apprehension, therefore, 
that the new arrangement of the curriculum might 
lead to further complexity and pressure among 
competing " subjects," is to be met by the con- 
sideration that, on the contrary, this arrangement 
gives an opportunity to unify the curriculum, by 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 175 

closely connecting it with the actual life of the 
children [that is with their spiritual and in- 
tellectual life, as well as their physical], and by 
so linking up the several parts of it as to make one 
subject play, as it were, into the hands of another. 
Thus, the practical necessity for economy of time, 
points in the same direction as the educational 
necessity, for connectedness and clearness in the 
matter to be taught. The fact that so short a 
period of time is all that is available in the 
Elementary Schools must always be kept in view ; 
and the conclusion must be drawn from it that 
we have time only for what is most important and 
best, and that we are unable to spare any for what 
is second-rate or trivial. Where it becomes 
necessary to choose between two things each of 
which is, in its own way, valuable, it will be 
necessary to make the choice on grounds not of 
their abstract value, but of their value to the 
children concerned. Thus Algebra may, no doubt, 
be taught in such a way as to provide an excellent 
mental training; but if the circumstances of any 
school are such that the choice lies between fore- 
going History and foregoing Algebra, a sense of 
educational proportion will decide that History 
should be retained before Algebra. A man who is 
ignorant of Algebra cannot be called "uneducated" 
in the same sense as a man who is ignorant of 



176 HISTORY IN 

History, nor is his ignorance likely to be so 
injurious to liimself and to others . 

It is not easy to calculate precisely wliat amount 
of time is likely to be available for the lessons in 
History. In tbe lower standards, tbe claims of 
the "elementary subjects" are paramount, and 
Eeading and Writing, in especial, absorb a large 
number of bours. Above Standard IV. it is 
possible to transfer a considerable amount of tbeir 
time to more interesting matter, but on the otber 
band Manual Training bas to be provided for with 
the Boys, and Cookery with the Girls. The advice 
of experienced teachers in the service of the Board 
has been taken on the point, and some tables 
showing typical distribution of hours in London 
Schools are printed as an appendix to this Heport. 
It will perhaps be safest to say that in Standards 
III. and IV. the time available for oral lessons in 
History will vary from about IJ to about 2 hours, 
and in Standards V., VI. and VII., from IJ to 2-| 
hours, while in the Higher Grade Schools it may 
be possible to contrive a minimum allowance of 
2 hours for History. This time ought to be 
altogether apart from the time given to Reading 
Lessons with " History Readers. " 

III. Reference to the Experience of Foreign 
Countries. 
How can the short time thus available be used 
to the best advantage? 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 177 

We have, ready to liand, tlie experience of 
foreign countries in wliich tlie teacliing of History 
has long been regarded as a vital part of the 
national training in the Primary Schools. 

Englishmen, however, while ready to learn as 
much as possible from foreign examples, more 
particularly where foreign experience goes back 
for many years, will feel that there are two points 
in which such models are not to be followed : — 

(i) History lessons ought not to be made a 
vehicle either for partisan feeling in home 
affairs, or for international grudges in the 
discussion of foreign politics. The English 
spirit of fair play to opponents condemns 
alike the republican propaganda carried on 
in the schools of one great continental 
nation, and the anti-socialistic crusade 
which is maintained in the schools of 
another. International bitterness may be 
kept alive for generations by unfair or 
unwise history-teaching. 

(ii) A detailed syllabus precisely uniform for 
all schools is not advisable, because it leaves 
too little room for the initiative and the 
individual interests of the teacher. The 
highly centralised continental systems tend 
to depress local variety and personal enter- 



178 HISTORY IN 

prise in tlie sclieme of instruction. What 
is required is ratlier a guide in outline than 
a minutely prescribed routine. Within 
the limits of this general outline, managers 
and teachers should be encouraged to 
frame their own syllabus. 

With these two points in mind, it should be 
possible to take full advantage of foreign experi- 
ence. The syllabus in the French Schools is 
particularly clear and suggestive; it has been the 
work of men of great distinction, who have set a 
high value upon the effects which good instruction 
in this subject might be likely to produce for the 
national life. It will be found, translated, in an 
appendix to this Eeport. In Prussia the features 
of chief value seem to be : — 

(a) The rich historical element in the religious 
teaching, extending not only to Hebrew 
History, but also to the History of Christen- 
dom in outline; 
(6) The excellent use made in the lessons on the 
mother-tongue of pieces of poetry and prose 
which have a national and historic interest ; 
(c) The high character of the reading books, 
which are larger and fuller than the corres- 
ponding books in England, and are not 
"written down" in the same way to the 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 179 

supposed level of children, but consist, in 
the higlier classes at least, of passages from 
standard authors; 

(d) The use of national songs for school music, 
including not only patriotic songs (which, 
in Germany, are of a noble type alike in 
words and in melodies), but also old folk- 
songs, relating to the lives of peasants and 
huntsmen, and so forth, and containing 
vivid pictures of old times; 

(e) The direct instruction in History is confined 
to a continuous series of biographies taken 
from German History between a.d. 1600 and 
the present time, together with a few repre- 
sentative biographies from earlier German 
History. " So far as the children are able 
to grasp it, the chief features of the progress 
of civilisation are also to be dealt with." 

The most valuable contribution of Germany to 
the teaching of History in Schools is to be found 
in the educational writings of Herbart, whose 
main principles have been followed in this 
memorandum. 

In Switzerland, the course prescribed varies in 
the different cantons; the matter is mainly Swiss 
History, with just so much of foreign history as 
bears directly upon it; the method is oral narra- 



180 HISTORY IN 

tive reinforced by a reading book. I was present 
once at an admirable piece of " story-telling" by a 
Swiss teaclier in a little village-scbool in the 
Canton de Yaud, and tbe effect of tbe lesson npon 
the class was so strong that I was able to realise 
bow pride in a common history, carefully fostered 
at school, can keep together in political union a 
number of scattered cantons, separated in some 
cases by high alps, and estranged from one another 
hj differences of blood, language, and religion. 

In the United States of America, there is great 
diversity in different parts of the country in regard 
to the History instruction. An appendix to the 
extremely interesting " Report upon History in 
Schools by the Committee of Seven," published by 
the Macmillan Company in 1899, shows that expert 
opinion believes that this diversity is so extreme 
as to be mischievous. " It is not possible to discuss 
here," says the writer of the Appendix (p. 159), 
*'the advantages of uniform curricula within 
limited areas, but it may be noted that progress in 
education has invariably followed the adoption of 
such an uniform course, and that those nations 
that have uniformity to-day have, as a rule, the 
best systems of education. With two exceptions, 
the ten States of the Union that have no uniform 
course of instruction are among the most backward 
in America in all matters of public education." 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 181 

Tlie Appendix to this American report con- 
cludes with a " practicable scheme " for History 
Instruction in Elementary Schools, which may be 
outlined thus : — 

Grade III. (children of about 8 years of age). — 
Stories from Homer, the Sagas, etc. 

Grade IV. — Biographies of great men of all 
ages and nations. 

Grade Y. — Greek and Roman History to 

800 A.D. 

Grade YI. — Mediseval and Modern European 
History. 

Grade YIL — English History. 

Grade YIII. (children of about 13 years of 
age). — American History. 

lY. What purposes is Instruction in History 
intended to fulfil for the school 
Children of London? 

Passing now to the problem of the ideal course 
in History for Elementary Schools in London, we 
must revert to the opinion already put forward, 
that the supreme advantage of the new system of 
awardino^ grants lies in the fact that it restores 



182 HISTORY IN 

unity and simplicity to the main body of the 
curriculum, and enables us to consider a scheme 
of historical instruction which may be in the most 
vital and interesting relation (i.) to the actual 
lives, in school and after school, of the children 
themselves, (ii.) to the remainder of the school 
curriculum. 

If it be granted that the main purpose of 
elementary schooling is to put the scholar in the 
way of understanding what, in essential points, the 
environment of his life, physical and mental, is to 
be, and of acting rightly upon the understanding 
thus gained, then what we call his ''History 
Lessons" will have a definite part of this task to 
accomplish, and the syllabus of history will be 
adjusted as means to this end. 

The vitally important purposes which the 
historical part of his instruction has to serve for 
the scholar may perhaps be summed up as the 
following : — 

(i) To furnish pictures of human life, connected 
with tales of human experience and types 
of human conduct in the chief epochs and 
anaong the chief races of mankind, and thus 
{a) to provide the ideas which must be the 
substratum of all the later work, (6) to 
suggest and nourish those feelings of human 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 183 

sympatlij and admiration whicli are of sucli 
vital importance in forming tlie will, and 
ultimately the character, of the child. 
Such tales are to be found in the simplest 
and most appropriate form in primitive 
folk-stories and poems. 

(ii) To give an outline of the story of the 
British people, with clear pictures of repre- 
sentative incidents and representative men 
and women; and to connect this outline 
with the state of the nation at the present 
day. 

(iii) To give some conception of the growth of 
London and of its position now as the centre 
of a world-wide commerce, and the capital 
city of an immense dominion; and to take 
advantage of every visible monument that 
connects its present with its past. 

(iv) To convey some idea of the long and difficult 
process by which human civilisation has 
come to be what it is, and of the debt under 
which we lie to the great men of all nations. 

(v) To give rudimentary notions of the way in 
which the business of a great people is 
carried on, and of the duties and opportuni- 
ties which free citizenship implies, both in 
our local and our national affairs. 



184 HISTORY IN 

(vi) To explain, in an elementary way, how 
History comes to be written, what are the 
materials for it, and what is meant by 
"evidence" for a supposed historical fact; 
how History may be studied, where to look 
for the best books, and how to carry on the 
pursuit of it after the school life is over. 

These may be taken as the main purposes of 
History lessons in the Elementary Schools of 
London. It is plain that only the most "element- 
ary" points can be taken under each head, but it 
is worth while to recollect that "elementary" in 
this connexion ought not to mean merely the 
easiest or the most commonplace, but the most 
essential and the most fruitful parts of the study. 
Careful selection must needs be made, and those 
"elements" must be taken which are richest in 
suggestion, and fullest of interest and of meaning. 
Half a million of children are receiving instruction 
under the School Board for London; and for the 
immense majority of these, the instruction so 
received will be the only systematic mental training 
which they ivill get, all their lives long. It seems 
clear, therefore, that nothing vital can safely be 
omitted altogether, but at least a beginning must 
be made of each indispensable topic. 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 185 

By tlie amendment of Bye-Laws passed by tlie 
Board on 18tli October, 1900, the age for com- 
pulsory attendance was raised to fourteen, and the 
standard for exemption was raised to YII. It will 
therefore be safe to count on the mass of the 
children remaining through the seven standards. 

The following course of instruction is proposed 
to meet these various points. 



v.— CONNECTED SYLLABUS OF LESSONS IN HISTORY, 



HISTORY. 



Standards 
I. & IL 



*Standard 
III. 



*Standard 
IV. 



Standard 
V. 



Standard 
VI. 



Standard 
VII. 



Ex-VII. 



Tales from the great national collections, such as " The 
Sagas," "The Morte d' Arthur," "The Arabian Nights," 
" The Poems of Homer," &c., to be illustrated by wall- 
pictures, and to be told orally. 

Representative scenes and persons from British History : 
outline of the story of the British -people. 



The same : but vnth fuller details — especially in refer • 
ence to Scottish and Irish History. 



Heroes and Heroines of European History, ancient and 
modern, in peace and in war. 



The growth of the British Empire, and of its capital, 
London ; lives of the great discoverers, inventors and 
Avarriors. First lessons on Citizenship. 

Visits to the Tower, St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey. 

Thirty-five lessons on Citizenship, local and national. 
Visits continued. 

Thirty-five lessons on a special period of about thirty 
years {e.g., the reign of Elizabeth, or the Long Parlia- 
ment, or the Age of Anne), with reference to writings 
of the time and visits to buildings and monuments ; 
first notions on the materials of History and the use of 
evidence. 

Home Reading and the use of Libraries. 

As in Standard VII. Varied series of special periods, 
ancient and modern, British and Foreign. 



* NOTE.^ — It will be seen that the History work allotted to Standards 
III. and IV. is an outline of British History, with representative scenes in 
detail. Some teachers will prefer to break this subject-matter into two 
sections, and take the History from B.C. 55 to 1500 a.d. in Standard III., 
and from 1500 A.D. to the present time in Standard IV. Others, adopting 



GEOGRAPHY, ENGLISH LITERATURE, AND MUSIC. 



LITERATURE . 



GEOGRAPHY. 



MUSIC. 



The same, with simple 
tales in verse. All exer- 
cises in " English" to be 
connected with these. 



Easy explanation of 
terms arising out of 
the tales. 



The same, with easy verse, England 
such as the " Loss of 
the Royal George," &c. 



The same. 



Selections from the "Lays 
of Ancient Rome " and 
easy ballads, 

"Lyra Heroica," 
Southey's "Life of 
Nelson," &c. 



Standard works in prose 
and verse from the 
great writers of the 
special period selected. 



As in Standard VII. 
Home Reading of 
historical novels. 



The British Isles 



Eur 



ope 



The Port of London, 
commercial routes, 
steamer lines, sketch 
of the British Empire. 

Connexion of Geography 
and History : influence 
of climate and soil on 
national life and in- 
dustry ; effects of great 
mountain ranges, seas, 
and rivers, &c. 



Advanced study of 
Physical Geography 
and of the History of 
Geographical Discovery, 

Commercial Geography. 



Easy old English 
airs. 



Simple national 
songs of Eng- 
land and Eng- 
lish Life, 

Songs of Eng- 
land, Scotland, 
Ireland, and 
Wales. 

Easy songs of all 
nations. 



Dibdin's sea- 
songs, &c. 



More difficult 
songs of all 
nations. 



the "concentric method," will prefer to cover the whole ground each 
year, but with greater fulness and detail in the second than the first. 
There is much to be said for both plans, and experiments in both should, 
I think, be encouraged, and the results carefully compared. 



188 HISTORY IN 

YI. How SHOULD THIS SyLLABUS BE DEALT WITH 

IN THE Standards? 

Experienced teacliers of tlie two lowest standards 
seem to be pretty well agreed that oral teacliing 
centred round large, brightly-coloured pictures is 
by far tbe most effective. It was in tbis way that 
Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, taugbt history to little 
children. A great deal depends upon the selection 
of the stories to be told. Theory and experience 
are at one in showing that tales of " the childhood 
of nations" are the fittest material, told as far as 
possible in the manner of the old poets and 
romancers. Such stories cannot be replaced by 
modern substitutes; they are rich with old fancy 
and adventure, and preserve the living spirit of 
earlier ages. For this reason they are ''historical" 
in a more important sense than any account of 
actual events can be ; they are the " abstract and 
brief chronicle of the time." Their spirit and 
temper are akin to those of children ; the conditions 
of human life which they depict are simple, 
striking, and easily imagined. Story-telling of 
this kind is a fine art, which needs constant practice 
and the careful study of the great masters of 
narrative ; but it is an art that delights both 
teacher and taught, and it makes a lesson in litera- 
ture as well as in history. Care should be taken 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 189 

that tlie circumstances of tlie stories, tlie old ships 
and weapons, and lioiises and raiment are fully- 
realised by tlie children. It would be a great help 
for such work if several series of pictures could be 
prepared to illustrate the " Tale of Troy," and the 
"Arabian Nights," and the " Romances of Chivalry 
and the Crusades," together with books for the 
teachers containing the stories in simple form. 

In Standards III. and lY. a History Reader 
might, for the first time, come into use, giving a 
bright account of the story of the British people, 
with a few of the most important scenes in detail. 
At this stage, as in the two first standards, illustra- 
tions are an indispensable aid to interest and to 
memory. The magic lantern for certain purposes 
is the best of all illustrators. I gather from enquiry 
among teachers in London that its use has been 
found to enliven history work as nothing else can 
do; but if it is to become part of the regular 
apparatus of the subject, it follows that there 
should be at least one lantern in every school; 
that the supply of slides should be abundant, and 
constantly renewed; and that a record should be 
kept of those used in the different standards, with 
notes on their varying effectiveness for teaching 
purposes. Unless the slides are carefully adapted 
to the actual lessons given and employed to re- 
inforce the really important points, they become a 



190 HISTORY IN 

mere show, wliicli, so far from leaving any per- 
manent deposit in ^the mind, may even dissipate 
attention. The Central and Divisional Offices of the 
Board have already, I nnderstand, done much 
valuable work in organising appliances for instruc- 
tion. This work might with advantage be still 
further extended, and a number of easily accessible 
museums or collections of educational apparatus 
established in different districts. The History 
section of the Teachers' Guild Museum might yield 
suggestions. 

In Standard Y. a valuable set of lessons may be 
given on the lives of representative heroes and 
heroines of European History. The tendency 
hitherto has been to confine the attention of the 
children solely to their own country. Such a 
tendency cannot be any more defensible in History 
than it would be in Geography. It cannot but 
tend to produce insularity of ideas, and to foster 
that false form of patriotism which ignores or 
despises other countries. A study of general 
History, in however rudimentary a form, would 
reveal the truth that Englishmen are under a debt 
hardly less great to the people of other races than 
to their own. A valuable help to teaching of this 
kind would be afforded by a Calendar of Great 
Men and Women, if such could be prepared by 
teachers specially interested in this side of school 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 191 

work. It miglit be grouped under tlie chief depart- 
ments of liuman activity, and be representative of 
every phase of the progress of mankind. 

In this connexion, reference must again be made 
to the valuable effect which might be produced by 
a careful syllabus of lessons in the historical study 
of the Scriptures. As three or four hours a week 
are devoted to Scripture Lessons, it should be 
possible to provide such a course without encroach- 
ing on the expository or hortatory side of the 
teaching of this subject. Indeed, lessons on the 
history and geography of "Bible Lands" and 
" Bible Nations " should be a stimulating variety, 
more particularly if only the most interesting and 
important points were taken, and if an attempt 
were made to cover, in bold sweeps, a large stretch 
of the history of antiquity, on its social and 
picturesque side. The materials for illustrating 
historical lessons on the Old and New Testament 
are abundant and accessible to a degree far exceed- 
ing those available for any other form of history. 
The great Missionary Societies, the Exploration 
Societies of Palestine, Egypt, and other Oriental 
countries have produced pictures, books, photo- 
graphs, and lantern slides in endless variety. 
This is a side of the work in which all denomina- 
tions, and indeed persons of every way of thinking, 
could join with complete unanimity. Perhaps a 



192 HISTORY IN 

reference to tlie Scripture Syllabus Committee in 
this matter might lead to tlie drawing up of a 
series of lessons on these lines, to cover the school 
course from Standard III. to Standard YII., and 
to embrace an elementary account of the Eastern 
Empires and of the Greeks and Romans in special 
relation to their connexion with the Hebrews and 
the Holy Land. 

One of the many problems of method which 
beset a teacher in giving history lessons is this — 
how are the children to be made active, and not 
merely receptive, in such lessons. How is it 
possible to provide them with things to do, corres- 
ponding with map-drawing in Geography, composi- 
tion in English Literature, and so forth? This 
problem may be attacked in Standard Y., 
partly by making the lesson in History an exercise 
in the use of hooks of reference, and encouraging 
pupils to "hunt things up" in dictionaries of 
biography, and to consult the indexes of larger 
works on History, kept in the school-library ; partly 
by getting them to draw chronological charts for 
themselves of a clear and simple kind, such as 
Professor Miall describes in his helpful work 
" Thirty Years of Teaching," or such as are set 
forth in the essay on "Ancient History," in the 
volume edited by Mr. P. A. Barnett, called "Teach- 
ing and Organisation." Experience shows that 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 193 

tlie making of such charts is a great pleasure to 
scholars in Standard Y. and upwards, and that it 
puts life and interest into the otherwise dreary 
subject of ^' dates." 

In Standard YI. the main idea of the course 
might well be "London, as the Capital of a Great 
Empire." The correlation of the History and the 
Greography, which has been kept in mind 
throughout, becomes specially fruitful here. It 
should be understood, however, that the Geography 
(as also the Literature), is meant to be 
co-ordinated with, and not subordinated to, the 
course of History lessons. Geography is a substan- 
tive subject and ought not to be treated as merely 
auxiliary to History. On the other hand, there is 
every ground for taking the various topics of both 
Geography and History in such an order that they 
may mutually illustrate and reinforce one another 
throughout the school-life. For these reasons, two 
courses, of History and Geography respectively, 
are educationally more valuable than a single 
course of History and Geography blended. London 
as a port and as a railway centre can only be 
understood with constant reference to British 
Commerce and British Colonies and Dependencies, 
and these again imply connected notions on the 
expansion of British Dominion. At this point the 
children should be old enough, and advanced 



194 HISTORY IN 

enough, to profit by visits to great monuments of 
local and national History. Such visits are already 
made in a good number of schools, and the teachers 
with whom I have conversed on the subject speak 
strongly of their valuable influence in quickening 
interest and intelligence. I understand, however, 
that there are difficulties in organising them. 
Individual application in every case has to be made 
to H.M. Inspector, and this implies some corres- 
pondence and possible delay, which, if the visits 
are to be systematised as a regular part of the 
instruction in the upper standards, would amount 
to a considerable impediment. It might be possible 
to overcome this difficulty by working out a com- 
plete scheme of such visits for the schools of 
different districts, and by applying beforehand for 
the sanction of H.M. Inspector for the arrange- 
ments of a whole year. Another, and more serious 
difficulty, is that of expense. In this point also 
central management and regular contracts might 
go far to diminish the obstacles in the way of an 
extended use of this most stimulating means 
of instruction. If rightly conducted, visits to 
historical sites and buildings exert an influence 
which no amount of mere talking or reading can 
possibly produce. Like the slides of a magic 
lantern, however, they easily degenerate into a 
mere show, unless they are carefully led up to by 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 195 

appropriate instruction, unless they are so managed 
as to concentrate tlie scholars' attention upon 
selected points of interest, and unless they are 
made the basis, later on, of exercises in composi- 
tion, and, wherever possible, in drawing. I have 
watched experiments conducted in this way, and 
my own experience confirms that of the London 
teachers as to their extreme value. Expenses con- 
nected with them ought to be regarded as in- 
cidental to "practical" or "laboratory" work in 
history, inasmuch as such visits bring the children 
into sensible contact with things which, otherwise, 
remain mere bookish abstractions. 

In Standard YII. other elements besides those of 
the picturesque and stirring may properly be intro- 
duced. At this point, some attempt, however 
brief and rudimentary, should be given to introduce 
scholars to the " Science of History," and to some 
concrete idea of how a history book comes to be 
written, what materials the historian uses, and 
what kind of evidence he has for his statements. 
If visits to historical sites and collections are con- 
tinued in this standard, lessons of this sort will be 
easily interwoven with them, and even if only two 
or three such lessons can be arranged for, will 
have, as I can testify by experience, a lively 
interest for the more intelligent of the scholars. 
At this point systematic lessons on citizenship. 



196 HISTORY IN 

local and national, and the liigli and responsible 
duties wliich free government confers on every 
Englishman, will come in their natural place, as 
the practical application of what has been studied 
in the lower classes. For these lessons the most 
potent aid will be the corporate life of the school 
itself. Where a school is so organised that the 
older scholars have responsible functions in con- 
nexion with its discipline and the management of 
its library, clubs, and games, they get a training 
for public duty, and in the management of common 
interests, which can be obtained by no other means. 
Work on committees, the election of officers, the 
control of funds, the drawing of a balance-sheet of 
a society's accounts, the management of a school 
library, the selection of a cricket team — these and 
similar activities give pupils an opportunity of 
ruling and obeying, and of understanding, through 
the government of their small commonwealth, the 
essential principles of organisation on the grandest 
scale. It is training of this kind which has formed 
the most valuable element in the life of our famous 
" Public Schools." 

With the older scholars it will also be natural to 
do all that is possible to start them in habits of 
private study such as may be a life-long pleasure 
to them. The use of a school-library may do much 
towards this. But the intelligent study of history 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 197 

in tlie highest classes will constantly entail the use 
by the boys of a good reference library. Skilful 
teachers often set questions "to be looked up/' 
and encourage in every way the habit of consulting 
books other than mere school text-books, and such 
work is of great value. So also is the kindly effort 
of those who form reading circles in connection 
with the National Home Reading Union, which 
may be carried on after the boys leave school. Of 
all the subjects in the school curriculum, History 
perhaps lends itself better than any to home- 
reading, and to the cultivation of the reading 
habit. It would undoubtedly greatly further this 
desirable end if scholars were freely allowed to 
take their history books home with them, and, if in 
the upper classes at least, they were provided with 
books of a good size, of which it should be under- 
stood that only parts were to be read in school, 
and the remainder studied at home. 

Much, also, might be done by strengthening the 
Teachers' Libraries by the addition of such books 
as illustrate the original sources of History and 
methods of teaching it — e.g., Miss Dodd's " Intro- 
duction to Herbartian Principles of Teaching." 
Extracts from, and facsimiles of, original docu- 
ments, photographs, casts of coins and medals, etc., 
all serve a useful purpose. 

Other subordinate aids have been successfully 



198 HISTORY IN 

employed by enthusiastic teacliers. ''History in 
the Making," ''History Day by Day," "Current 
Events," are sometimes illustrated by an " Events 
Board," on wbicli extracts and pictures from news- 
papers may be posted up. Children readily co- 
operate in a plan of this kind. 

Of high value, also, are the celebrations — quietly 
and discreetly carried out — of great national events 
and national anniversaries. If care is taken that 
they appeal to the thought and the responsibility 
of children, as well as to their love of excitement, 
they may give rise to lasting impressions of a 
common share in the life of a great human society. 
Such impressions relieve the routine of the school 
programme, and help to colour the whole round of 
school duties. Music and song may be a powerful 
aid to this purpose, and it will be noticed that in 
the syllabus proposed an essential element has been 
the study of old national melodies, many of which 
are as beautiful as they are simple and strong. 
Such melodies have a powerful influence, not only 
in rousing but also in refining the feelings of 
children. Their value to the school is twofold; 
they supply a form of music infinitely superior to 
the fourth-rate tunes specially written down to a 
mistaken idea of the taste of our schools, and also 
they illustrate much of our history and of old 
English social life. Dibdin's "Sea Songs" make 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 199 

a stirring accompaniment to tlie story of Britisli 
enterprise and adventure. Tlie Jacobite Songs 
give life to lessons on the first lialf of tlie IStli 
century. The old Hunting Airs and Country Songs 
bring a wliolesome and bracing influence into close 
urban scbool-rooms. So, also, tbe national and 
favourite melodies of foreign nations may be used 
to illustrate tbeir characteristics and their history. 
The abundance, variety, and musical richness of 
the " Folk Melodies," used in German Elementary 
Schools, may well attract the attention of English 
students of education. 

In Higher Elementary Schools and in Evening 
Continuation Schools, the work of the standards 
will naturally be continued and deepened, partly 
by a second complete survey of British History in 
outline ; partly, by the study of special periods, so 
far as possible with reference to original authori- 
ties, both in British and in Foreign, Ancient as 
well as Modern History ; partly by a more detailed 
study of economics and of the functions and duties 
of the English freeman, such as is scheduled in 
the code for Evening Continuation Schools. A 
great deal has already been done to make the 
teaching of History an important subject in the 
Evening Schools of the London Board. Possibly 
the use, in a simple form, of "laboratory'' or 
" research " methods in addition to lectures, would 



200 HISTORY IN 

quicken tlie active interest of the scholars in this 
subject. Here, also, as in the Day School, much 
depends on the right use of concrete and 
picturesque illustrations. Throughout the course 
of study one might take as one's guiding principle 
a saying of Professor Seeley's slightly modified : — 

"Without History, Citizenship has no root; with- 
out Citizenship, History has no fruit." 

It is because of its bearing on the future of our 
civic and national life, even more than an account 
of its value to the imagination and the under- 
standing, that the study of History may claim an 
honoured place on the time-table of our Primary 
Schools. 

If the syllabus given above is accepted as a 
" skeleton," it will be for every school to put flesh 
and blood between its dry bones, by drawing out 
and submitting schemes of lessons for each 
standard. These schemes will represent the 
particular needs of different localities, and of 
different types of scholars, together with the 
individual interests and enthusiasms of teachers. 
They will distinguish carefully between the work 
done as " reading " with a " Reading Book," and 
the " lessons " on special topics delivered orally. 
They will show the variety and freedom which 



ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS 201 

alone can make a syllabus live and move, while, at 
the same time, they will pursue the great chief 
aims, and conform to the main principles, which 
should be common to history-teaching in all 
schools, and which have been expressed in the 
outline-syllabus. In some such way as this the 
extremes alike of anarchy and of rigidity in the 
work may be avoided. 



New Authorities 
in Education 



THE NEW AUTHORITIES IN 
ENGLISH EDUCATION. 

The point whicli England has reached in the 
task of organising her education is critical. We 
require to understand exactly what the state of 
things is now, what the object is that we wish to 
achieve, and what are the means proposed for its 
achievement. If we could only secure that English 
children should be brought up in the best way 
practicable, it would make a quite infinite 
difference to them and to the future of the country. 
About that we are agreed. At present they are 
being brought up, for the most part, in ways that 
are far from the best possible, and that might be 
improved promptly. About that we are agreed. 
What we want, at this moment, is to look carefully, 
so that when the time comes we may leap boldly. 
If we do not look carefully now, it will not save us 
that, when the time comes, we leap feebly and 
nervously, or, worse still, haltingly shift our feet 
on an impossible position. 

We need, then, first, a clear idea of our object ; 
second, an accurate knowledge of our position and 
resources (to be reached by a process of comparison 
with those of other nations) ; and third, a vigorous 



206 NEW AUTHORITIES 

adjustment of every ounce of our means to the 
achievement of our end; — we need clear strategy, 
thorougli reconnaissance, appropriate and energetic 
tactics. Above all, we require, wlien tlie liour for 
action arrives, to subordinate any " political " or 
" official " ends to the educational end, just as, in 
another field, we ought to subordinate them to the 
military end. 

I. 

Our object is to improve our education. The 
point in which it most conspicuously calls for 
improvement is universally acknowledged, although 
it is somewhat variously expressed and defined. 
The Earl of Rosebery, in a speech at Chatham on 
the 22nd January, 1900, puts it in this way: — "I 
humbly think that in this country we live a great 
deal too much from hand to mouth. We do not 
proceed by scientific method. We go on the 
principle that things have carried us so well so far, 
that we are a noble nation, that we are pretty 
numerous, and that we have always muddled out 
right in the end. . . . But I say this : that 
we are a people of enormous waste. We waste 
simply by not pursuing scientific methods. . 
Germany is infinitely more painstaking and 
scientific in its methods than we are. ... In 
commerce, in education, and in war, we are not 
methodical, we are not scientific, we are not 
abreast of the more advanced nations of the day. 



IN EDUCATION 207 

And if we want to keep our place, we shall have to 
consider the lessons we have been taught in this 
respect. Depend upon it, however brilliant you 
may be, the tortoise of investigation, method, and 
preparation will always catch up and overtake the 
hare, which leaves everything to the inspiration 
and effort of the moment." 

Our education, says Lord Eosebery in effect, like 
our other activities, suffers from our " hand to 
mouth " or " rule of thumb " way of doing things, 
a way which is always dangerously wasteful and 
clumsy, but is certainly fatal when it has to deal 
with circumstances wholly new and exceedingly 
complex, such as have never been thumbed or 
handled before. What we need, he adds, is 
'' investigation, method, preparation." 

This is no fresh discovery. A complete 
generation has passed away since Matthew Arnold 
proclaimed it, importunely, opportunely, in Blue 
Books, and Reviews, and wherever he could get a 
hearing. It is nearly i thirty-two years ago that 
he wrote as follows: — "The idea of science and 
systematic knowledge is wanting to our whole in- 
struction alike, and not only to that of our business 
class. While this idea is getting more and more 
power upon the Continent, and while its application 
there is leading to more and more considerable 
results, we in England, having done marvels by 
the rule of thumb, are still inclined to disbelieve 

1. 1868, in "Schools and Universities on the Continent." 



208 NEW AUTHORITIES 

in tlie paramount importance, in whatever depart- 
ment, of any other. And yet in Germany everyone 
will tell yon that the explanation of the late 
astonishing achievements of Prussia is simply that 
everyone concerned in them had thoroughlj^ learnt 
his business on the best plan by which it was 
possible to teach it to him. In nothing do England 
and the Continent at the present moment more 
strikingly differ than in the prominence which is 
now given to the idea of science there, and the 
neglect in which this idea still lies here ; a neglect 
so great that we hardly even know the use of the 
word science in the strict sense, and only employ it 
in a secondary and incorrect sense." 

What our chief and most dangerous deficiency 
was, in Matthew Arnold's eyes, in 1868, that it 
still remains, in Lord Rosebery's, in 1900. Both, 
in different ways, are exceptionally gifted, and 
exceptionally experienced observers; both arrive 
at the same conclusion. What we lack is " in- 
vestigation, method, preparation," painstaking and 
scientific method," *'the idea of science, and 
systematic knowledge." 

It is indispensable, before we go further, that 
we should be clear as to what both these critics 
mean by " science " and " scientific method." Tor, 
most unhappily, what Matthew Arnold called the 
" incorrect and secondary " sense of the terms is 
still mainly prevalent in this country. Science 
ought not to mean "natural science" alone, but 



IN EDUCATION 209 

tlie whole body of systematic knowledge, whether 
in the "humanities" or in "nature-studies." 
There is a science of history, and of literary 
criticism, and of law, and of every kind of human 
activity just as truly as there is a science of 
zoology or of chemistry. Scientific method, it is 
true, differs in its applications, though not in its 
ultimate principles, with the various subject- 
matters of which it treats. It is of the essence of 
scientific method (which means the best-informed, 
the most flexible, the most rational method) that it 
should so differ. And just because scientific method 
varies, it becomes essential that a "man of science" 
should have an all-round liberal training before he 
devotes himself to his " specialist " study. Other- 
wise he is likely to be unscientific in every province 
but his own. 

By " science," then, our two critics mean that 
intelligent habit of mind which leads to "investiga- 
tion, method, preparation," a " painstaking and 
systematic" treatment of the subject, whatever it 
be, which it is called upon to deal with. In this 
sense, the " scientifically " minded man is one with 
a trained power of thought, an aptitude for the 
careful collection and comparison of data, and an 
ability for concentrated reflection upon the data 
so obtained. One can tell in five minutes whether 
a man has this habit of mind or not, by the way in 
which he will address himself to a new book or a 
strange fact. He has a trained instinct for the 



210 NEW AUTHORITIES 

appropriate method required by tlie particular in- 
vestigation ; if he has not the requisite knowledge, 
he knows at least that he does not know. And 
further, he knows where, and how, he can get to 
know the best that has been hitherto thought and 
written upon the subject, and what kind and 
degree of certainty he will be able to reach in 
regard to the problem which occupies him. He 
knows that men have arrived at mastery over them- 
selves and over nature by a severe effort to see 
things as they truly are and by the play of high 
imagination and intense reflection upon things 
thus truly seen. By no other process will he expect 
results of any value either from himself or from 
others. 

All this is a thrice-told tale. It was put by 
Plato and by Aristotle with a clearness to which 
we " moderns " can add nothing. It is only 
repeated here in order that we may formulate again 
what it is that we are aiming at when we say that 
we want to improve our education. 

We are aiming to produce a certain habit of 
mind, the habit of "investigation, method, and 
preparation " applied in their appropriate forms to 
the various aspects of the whole body of systematic 
knowledge, a habit which shows itself, first, in a 
many-sided interest, and secondly, in a many-sided 
capability, a habit which results in a mastery over 
self and a mastery over things. 

Such a statement of our end will supply us with 



IN EDUCATION 211 

a touclistoiie by wliicli we can very readily judge 
tlie worth of our present system of education in its 
different parts, and also the worth of certain 
proposals which are being made for its improve- 
ment. But before we proceed to apply the touch- 
stone, it is necessary to stay for a moment to 
consider in what sense Englishmen would be 
willing to accept this as a statement of the end at 
which they are aiming in their efforts after a better 
education. It must be admitted at once that 
Englishmen care little or nothing for such an end 
viewed as mere " culture," or " knowledge for the 
sake of knowledge," or under any of the other 
forms which appeal to the German mind so 
strongly. It is not natural or attractive to them 
in such a guise. They view education not as an 
end in itself, but sometimes as a matter of religion, 
sometimes as a matter of society, sometimes as a 
matter of commercial or industrial effectiveness. 
" Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make 
you free," appeals to an Englishman. So does, 
'' He that hateth instruction loves death." He is 
touched also when he is pulled up short in any of 
his numerous activities by lack of the requisite 
knowledge to go further. He hates a "muff" and 
a blunderer, and he is quick to see when anybody 
outdoes him in some dexterity by better knowledge. 
Above all, international rivalry, whether in war or 
in trade, puts him upon his mettle, and, in time, 
drives him to " go into training " and to " get the 



212 NEW AUTHORITIES 

thing up." Nor need tlie Englisliman be ashamed 
of this way of regarding education. It was from 
the point of view of the "polity" that Plato and 
Aristotle looked at it; it is in its relation to the 
"social organism" that much modern speculation 
looks at it. A community of men, a " social 
organism," is a living body which must — like any 
other living body — harmonise its nature with its 
environment and its environment with its nature. 
Every living thing is called upon for a ceaseless 
effort of adaptation; when the effort slackens, the 
live thing grows old; when the effort ceases, the 
live thing dies. In a " social organism" this 
adaptive effort is exerted chiefly upon its still 
growing tissue, that is upon its younger members, 
who are, as it were, plastic and susceptible to vital 
change. Education, thus regarded, is the instinc- 
tive eifort which the social body makes to adapt 
itself to vital needs. A right habit of mind then 
becomes no mere accomplishment or grace, it is a 
condition of continued national vitality. We must 
as a nation get to know the truth, and transform 
ourselves in conformity with it, or else pay the 
penalty and go under to nations more far-seeing 
and more energetic. This is the way in which 
Matthew Arnold put it to us thirty years ago, and 
this is the way Lord Itosebery put it to us the other 
day. We must adapt ourselves to our environment, 
or prepare for senility and death. But consider 
what an enviro ment that strange organism has 



IN EDUCATION 213 

wliicli we call tlie Britisli nation. Its environment 
is formed not merely by " natural forces," nor by 
tbe pressure of competing national organisms, but 
also by its own destiny and tlie position which it 
has won for itself in the world. Consider its vast 
complexity : our Oriental religion, our literature, 
learning, and language drawn in great part from 
the civilisation of ancient Greece and Rome, our 
Teutonic constitution and manners, our modern 
material enterprise, our huge plexus of industrial 
and colonial activities. Such an environment 
requires not merely a stupendous output of energy, 
but, by its constantlv increasing complexity, calls 
for a more and more complicated and careful 
study, a growing flexibility and versatility of 
mind. 

It is this call that our education seeks to answer ; 
it is because the answer is inadequate that we 
endeavour to improve our education. We need 
stability of character, we need energy; but these 
qualities we may, with some warrant, claim in a 
great measure to possess, and our education, as it 
exists, does much to foster them. But we also 
need a trained intelligence, a power of severe and 
concentrated reflection, a many-sided interest and 
a many-sided capability, a habit of mind flexible 
and versatile, resourceful, and apt for " investiga- 
tion, method, and preparation." These are qualities 
which we acknowledge that we plentifully lack. 
But we must work for them, for they are the pre- 



214 NEW AUTHORITIES 

requisites of successful national vitality in tlie case 
of a nation with so complex an environment as 
ours. And we must judge proposed improvements 
in our education by constantly enquiring how far 
they are likely to conduce to this desirable habit 
of mind. 

II. 

We have stated our end, we have got our touch- 
stone. But before we proceed to apply it to the 
criticism of proposals shortly to be laid before the 
country through Parliament, we must first very 
briefly survey our present position and forces. We 
must reconnoitre the ground before we can begin 
satisfactorily to consider how our means are to be 
adjusted to our acknowledged purpose. 

Our opportunities of making such a reconnaiss- 
ance are becoming rapidly greater than they were. 
For primary Education we have the Reports issued 
yearly by the Education Department. For 
Secondary Education we have the Report of the 
Royal Commission (generally quoted as the '' Bryce 
Commission") in 1895; we have Mr. Graham 
Balfour's admirable book '' The Educational 
Systems of Great Britain and Ireland," published 
in 1898 ; we have the excellent series of '^ Special 
Reports on Educational Subjects," which, under 
the editorship of Mr. M. E. Sadler, have served as 
the Reports of an Intelligence Department for 
Education. But, if we are to apply here also our 



IN EDUCATION 215 

main guiding principle and to admit tliat what we 
chiefly need is " investigation, method, prepara- 
tion," and "systematic knowledge," we must a£&rm, 
at tlie very outset, that what is first wanted is a 
Central Department for Secondary Education, so 
manned and equipped that it may give, with 
authority, and after a clear review of actual facts, 
such a description of the present state of our 
Secondary Schools as may enable us to deal with 
them according to knowledge.^ We have not yet 
got a lucid and complete account of the different 
agencies and institutions, private, proprietary, and 
endowed, which are at work in higher education. 
We are still labouring largely in the dark, '' hand 
to mouth," by "rule of thumb," in the hope that 
we may " muddle out right in the end." 

At the very outset of our reconnaissance, there- 
fore, we are forced to confess that we do not pro- 
perly know the country, and that we have no 
authoritative and trustworthy map of it. The 
"scientific habit of mind" obliges us to begin by 
saying that, before anything else is done, we must 
call for the prompt making of such a map, founded 
on a survey to be carried out by the only possible 
authority, viz., an adequately manned and equipped 
Central Department of Secondary Education. 

Of the schools at the two extremes, it is true, we 
know fully enough for our purpose. The great 

1. The Education Department Returns of Secondary and 
other Schools of 1897 and 1898 are admittedly incomplete. 



216 NEW AUTHORITIES 

Public Schools, the so-called non-local schools, 
whose heads are represented at the Headmasters' 
Conference, number about 25,000^ pupils. We 
have ample information about them and their 
courses of study, and their method of government. 
The recently published lives of Edward Thring and 
of R. H. Quick have given us a body of valuable 
criticism from within. Those who know them best 
would probably agree that the national defect 
shows itself conspicuously in them. They have 
bred generations of men possessed of energy and 
stability of character and of the power to obey 
and to command; but they not yet succeeded in 
communicating to the general body of their pupils 
a trained intellectual habit, an idea of scientific 
method, a power of severe and concentrated 
thinking, a many-sided interest and a many-sided 
capability. But no one is better aware of it than 
the masters of these great schools themselves; 
nowhere more than in these schools has there been 
of late years an effort made to come at the 
causes of this defect, and, so far as possible, to 
remove them. ^ The effort is not systematic, it is 
not scientific. But the blame for the want of 
"investigation, method, and preparation" in this 
respect lies rather with the public at large and the 
Universities than with the great schools. Oxford 

1. About 24,000 in 1897. Vide " Educational Systems of 
Great Britain and Ireland" (Graham Balfour), p. 157, footnote. 

2. The recently held Education Exhibition at the Imperial 
Institute gave ample proof of this. 



IN EDUCATION 217 

and Cambridge have only recently begun to move 
in tlie study of Education, and even now tliey have 
no properly equipped Board of Studies in the 
subject. The country has had no one to collect the 
information and to do the thinking in matters of 
Education, as it has had in matters of Law or 
Medicine. A schoolmaster in full work can no 
more adequately search and reflect upon the theory 
and practice of his art than a busy doctor with a 
large connexion can do. For the great schools, 
what is needed is a thorough study of Education 
at the Universities by men with sufficient leisure 
and opportunity to get at the facts and reflect upon 
them. There ought to be nothing in the genius or 
the tradition of the great schools that should make 
it impossible to graft upon the splendid public 
spirit and energetic character, which they already 
have, the scientific habit of mind and the idea of 
systematic knowledge, in which they are still to 
seek. 

But these schools have all the resources which 
wealth and influence can give them ; they are ably 
led; they may be left to work out their own 
salvation.^ 

Passing from them to the Primary Schools, we 

pass from a group of 25,000 pupils to a group of 

1. I have said nothing about Girls' Schools at this point, 
because there are no Girls' Schools which quite answer to 
Eton, Winchester, and the like for boys. The sisters of the 
I'ublic School boys are not yet to be found, in any great 
numbers, at the Girls' High Schools, which correspond rather 
to the great town Grammar Schools. 



218 NEW AUTHORITIES 

5,500,000. Taking boys only, there are at least 
100 in tlie Primary Schools for one in the Public 
Schools. This great mass of children are under 
instruction, roughly speaking, for six years, from 
their fifth year to their eleventh. The conditions 
under which this instruction is given are such that 
it is extremely difficult to develop by its means 
even the rudiments of that trained mental habit of 
reasonable method which we have stated to be the 
main object of our Education. There is no doubt, 
however, that recent changes have all been in the 
right direction; the substitution of inspection for 
examination is greatly in favour of more intelligent 
teaching. But a vast deal still remains to be done. 
The curriculum of our Elementary Schools is at 
once narrow and complicated, and the different 
"subjects" are dealt with in an artificial and 
mechanical way. Thus of the four "subjects" of 
History, Geography, Elementary Nature Know- 
ledge, and Elementary English, not more than two 
may be taken in any one school. Yet it must be 
clear that nothing is so likely to prevent the growth 
of a " scientific " or " reasonable " type of mind as 
to teach History without Geography, or Geography 
without Nature Knowledge, or any one of the three 
without the rudiments of an understanding of the 
Grammar of the Mother Tongue. Again, some 
sort of training in manual arts, treated rationally, 
not mechanically (as in the Swedish form of wood- 
work), is for young children an invaluable intro- 



IN EDUCATION 219 

duction to sound habits of work in all subjects. A 
boy wbo can cut cardboard or wood, accurately, for 
the making of some simple, useful article, to a 
design drawn and, at least in part, invented by 
bimself, may be said to liave tbe root of sound 
method in him. Yet manual training is not an 
obligatory part of our primary instruction. 
Drawing is taught in an abstract and dull form, 
divorced from all connexion with actual life and 
from concrete visible objects, and with little rela- 
tion to either use or beauty. The pupil-Teacher 
system— in spite of the strong recommendations of 
the Departmental Committee of 1897 — remains, at 
least in the rural schools, largely unreformed. The 
employment of wholly unqualified teachers [under 
Article 68 of the Code] is, in country districts, 
largely on the increase. Of these teachers there 
were 8,534 in 1893 and 15,136 in 1898.^ The large 
use of unskilled labour and of child labonr for the 
difficult work of instruction is mainly due to the 
financial necessities of the Voluntary Schools. It 
is a scandal to our national life that some business- 
like compromise 2 has not yet been arranged 
between sensible men of all ways of thinking, by 
which the ecclesiastical quarrels, which cripple 
half the schools of the country, might be smoothed 

1. Education Department's Report for 1898-9, p. xxiv. 

2. On some such lines as those suggested by Mr. T. Horsfall, 
of Manchester, in his important pamphlet " Reforms needed in 
our System of Elementary Education," published by J. E. 
Cornish in 1897. 



220 NEW AUTHORITIES 

over or adjusted. As it is, Yoluntary Scliools 
refuse local control, and thereby siiut themselves 
out from the aid of local rates. And this necess- 
arily implies the lack of means for further progress. 
The denominational difficulty appears again in the 
inadequate supply of Training Colleges for Primary 
Teachers. Most of the old Residential Colleges, 
with the notable exception of those founded by the 
British and Foreign School Society, were largely 
built with denominational funds, and they are 
preserved for denominational purposes by the 
imposition of a test on entrance. The new type of 
Training College — the so-called Day Training 
Colleges, affiliated to Universities — receive a grant 
at a rate much below that assigned to the old type, 
and are, therefore, unable to meet at all adequately 
the lack of accommodation. In the meantime the 
Primary Schools continue to be staffed to a very 
large degree by unskilled, or half -trained, teachers. ^ 
This is strikingly at variance with the state of 
things in Trance and Germany, and must plainly 
be remedied, if we are in earnest in wishing to see 
the " idea of sj^stematic knowledge " more widely 
diffused among our population. 

Just at this moment, however, public interest is 
mainly concentrated upon the large body of schools 
which lie between the great Public Schools on one 

1. The figures for 1898 were 59,874 certificated teachers, 
26,736 uncertificated assistants, 31,038 pupil-teachers, and 
15,136 " additional" [i.e., unqualified) teachers, under Article 68. 



IN EDUCATION 221 

side and tlie Primary Schools on tlie otlier. This 
is a dim region, a debatable land, of wbicb, as has 
already been said, we possess no complete and 
authoritative survey. Mr. Sadler's Intelligence 
Department, if one may so call it, has done all that 
was possible — without full powers — to get at the 
statistics ; and we may say roughly that, boys and 
girls together, there are about 300,000 pupils now 
at work in such schools. The condition of these 
schools, in respect of curriculum, staff, equipment, 
and administration, varies enormously. The 
Endowed Schools have, without doubt, made con- 
spicuous progress since the Taunton Commission 
reported in 1869; great things in the last quarter 
of the century have been done by Proprietary 
Schools, especially for Girls, under the guidance 
of such associations as the Girls' Public Day School 
Company. Some remarkable experiments have 
been made by Private Schools, such as those which 
M. Edmond Demolins so vivaciously described in 
his notable book, "A quoi tient la superiorite des 
Anglo-Saxons" [Paris, Firmin-Didot, 1897]. But 
the Eeport of the Eoyal Commission in 1895 again 
affirmed, upon the evidence collected by them, that 
which was the common belief of qualified observers, 
that the condition of our Secondary Schools left 
much to be desired, and much that was, with 
proper organisation, capable of prompt improve- 
ment. The defects might be classified as defects 
of {a) administration, (6) staff, (c) buildings and 



222 NEW AUTHORITIES 

equipment, (J) instruction. As to (a) tlie main 
defect arises from want of any connexion or co- 
ordination between authorities. This is true, not 
only of the authorities of single institutions, but 
even of those public authorities which deal with 
many different institutions. Thus Educational 
Endowments, yielding an income of about £700,000 
per annum, are under the general control of the 
Charity Commissioners, who have issued new 
schemes for so many of the old Grammar Schools. 
But the Charity Commissioners have no official 
connection whatever with another public authority, 
the School Boards, which in many places have been 
supplying, through the so-called Higher Grade 
Schools, a type of education which they believed, 
rightly or wrongly, that the old Grammar Schools 
neither could nor would provide. This new type 
has undoubtedly drawn pupils away from the older 
schools. Thus in the same district, public authori- 
ties are, with public money, organising rival 
institutions — a confused and wasteful system, 
certainly not "scientific" in Lord Rosebery's sense. 
There are, however, other authorities in the field, 
who render the confusion worse confounded. The 
Science and Art Department, after contenting 
itself, for some years, with o:ffering certificates and 
grants to classes, or groups of classes, began in 
1872 to encourage the formation of Organised 
Science Schools (now called Schools of Science), in 
which a continuous course of Scientific Instruction 



IN EDUCATION 223 

sliould be given througli several years. At first 
the growth of these schools was extremely slow. 
In 1885 there were ^ only three of them ; in 1895, 
however, there were 112; and in 1897 there were 
169. By means of the large bounty which the 
Department had the means of putting on to their 
own subjects [amounting in Schools of Science to 
about £6 per pupil per annum] they were able to 
hold out great inducements to governing bodies, 
and to enable their schools to compete on very 
advantageous terms with others which offered 
either a course mainly classical, or a course mainly 
in modern languages and in commercial subjects. 
The hold which the Department thus secured upon 
the field of Secondary Education was greatly 
strengthened by the Technical Instruction Act of 
1889, which makes the Science and Art Department 
'' the central authority which decides in the case of 
schools and institutions, or between schools and 
local authorities, on questions of distribution or 
grants, sufficiency of provision, and representation 
on governing bodies." ^ This linked them to the 
fourth kind of public authority which now entered 
upon the distracted scene — the Technical Instruc- 
tion Committees of County Councils, which 
administer a sum of about £700,000 a year, for the 
promotion of "Technical" subjects in classes and 

1. Vide "Educational Systems of Great Britain and 
Ireland," by Graham Balfour, p. 173. 

2. Ibid, p. 181. 



224 NEW AUTHORITIES 

scliools. This link was riveted further by tlie 
famous Clause YI. of the Science and Art Depart- 
ment's Directory. Besides these four authorities — 
Charity Commission, School Boards, Science and 
Art Department, and County Council Technical 
Instruction Committees — there are certain examin- 
ing bodies of high standing which, though they 
have no funds to administer, or grants to offer (on 
the contrary, they charge considerable fees for 
their examinations), yet have great influence over 
many Secondary Schools, and in practice largely 
determine their curriculum and methods of study. 
The chief of these are the Oxford and Cambridge 
Joint Board, the Oxford Local Examinations 
Board, the Cambridge Local Examinations 
Board, the College of Preceptors, and perhaps we 
might add, in respect of its Matriculation 
Examination, the University of London. Working 
with these different authorities there are a multi- 
tude of public and private agencies, with an 
endless variety of institutions. Variety and 
spontaneity in this region of English Education 
are elements of extreme value, but they are char- 
acteristics also of an " unweeded garden." It 
should be quite possible to preserve them, and at 
the same time introduce some order into the chaos, 
something more " systematic and scientific," which 
should at least give us clear information as to 
the full nature and extent of our resources, and 
make suggestions as to the most economical and 



IN EDUCATION 225 

effectual ways of employing them. If we could 
only get this wilderness tliorouglily mapped and 
surveyed, it would be something towards a wiser 
treatment of it. For tliis purpose we need an 
adequate central authority for secondary education, 
linked with adequate local authorities. Each must 
be so equipped and manned as to take supervision 
of the whole field, of such high character and clear 
impartiality as to command the confidence of 
School Boards, Technical Authorities, Charity 
Commissioners, Universities, and Schools of all 
descriptions and types, and of such ability and 
experience as to be able to give general direction 
to concentrated efforts after our essential purpose : 
viz., the creation and diffusion among our people 
of '' an idea of systematic knowledge," and of 
'^ sound and intellectual habit." 

Defects (6), (c) and [d), in staff, curriculum, and 
buildings and equipment, can only very briefly be 
treated here. It is plain that, as Mr. Bryce pointed 
out eight years ago (in ^' Studies in Secondary 
Education") everything must turn upon our 
gradually obtaining a body of teachers so trained 
as to make the mental habit, many-sided interest 
and many-sided capability, the power of con- 
centrated thought, of ^^ investigation, method, and 
preparation," the main object of their work, instead 
of the present ceaseless cramming for unwisely 
conducted examinations. The registration and 
training of qualified teachers, the supervision of 



226 NEW AUTHORITIES 

examination and inspection, are clearly functions 
of a strong central authority for Secondar}^ 
Education. Without these, we shall have gained 
little or nothing. The same applies to the registra- 
tion of efficient schools, and to the inspection of 
buildings and equipment. These duties need not 
all be carried out in detail by the central authority, 
which may very well delegate some of its powers 
to bodies of competent academic standing. But it 
is for the central authority to assure itself that 
their academic standing is competent, and that 
they are conducting examinations and inspections 
upon intelligible principles, clearly related to the 
great end of all our educational efforts. If, in this 
way, we have once established a high authoritative 
Department, able to collect and to publish in- 
formation and to call for explanations, its very 
existence will put all lesser bodies into some kind 
of relation to itself, and therefore to one another, 
and we shall be well on our way to an organised 
variety of education, as distinct on the one side 
from our present chaos, and on the other from a 
dead and monotonous uniformity, such as follows 
from an " over-centralised " system. 



III. 



When we come to consider, in the light first of 
the true purpose of educational reform, and second 
of the existing state of our resources (so far as they 



IN EDUCATION 227 

are known), tlie proposed action of the Government 
in regard to secondary education, we shall have 
much reason for disquiet and for energetic effort 
to secure its amendment. The Board of Education 
Act takes effect from April 1, 1900. By that Act 
a Central Authority in Education of all grades is 
created. We have been officially promised (by the 
Lord President of the Council) that the new 
Department shall be organised in three sections, 
with an assistant-secretary at the head of each, and 
with a secretary-general at the head of the whole. 
The three sections are to be Primary, Technological, 
and Secondary. The Primary Section will be 
practically the same in scope and powers as the 
existing Education Department, and will administer 
the Public Elementary Schools, in communication 
with School Boards and Voluntary Managers, 
throughout the country. The only point of 
difficulty that is likely to arise in regard to its 
'' sphere of influence " will come up in connection 
with the Higher Grade Board Schools. Are these 
to be treated as Secondary Schools, or as '' Ecoles 
Primaires Superieures " ? There is much to be 
said on both sides, but in all probability least dis- 
location and confusion will be caused by keeping 
them under the Primary Section. But it will be 
one of the most delicate functions of the Secretary- 
General to secure that these schools may be so 
administered as not to overlap in a wasteful and 
mischievous manner with Secondary Schools in 



228 NEW AUTHORITIES 

their neiglibourliood, but to fulfil their true 
functions as Higher Primary Schools. But as 
between the other two sections of the new Board- — 
the Technological and the Secondary — there is 
grave risk that the Government action may do 
more harm than good, and may serve to perpetuate 
just exactly those evils of confusion and mis- 
understanding which rendered the work of re- 
organisation so plainly necessary. The functions 
of a Technological Section are clear. It should 
deal with pupils whose general, or "liberal," educa- 
tion is completed, and who have begun to specialise 
in some special branch of "applied science" — such 
as engineering, or agriculture, or chemical manu- 
facture. It is a specialist section, and by its very 
point of view is precluded from superintending an 
"all round" course of study, whether that course 
of study has science as its centre, or whether it has 
modern languages and commercial subjects, or, 
again, the " humanities " and literature as its main 
staple. A technological course pre-supposes a good 
" all-round " education, and must be ineffectual 
without it. Everyone is agreed upon that. And 
in these days when we are being called upon (with 
some plausibility) to " Germanise " ^ our education, 
we cannot too often remind ourselves that the 
German Secondary Schools are not technological 
in character. Anyone who takes the trouble to 

1. e.g., by Sir Swire Smith, at the meeting of the Associa- 
tion of Technical Institutes, January, 1900. 



IN EDUCATION 229 

read Mr. Sadler's admirable account of the Higher 
Schools in Prussia (published in the Education 
Department's '' Special Reports ") can see from the 
detailed account of curriculum and time-table, and 
from the statistics of school-numbers, first that the 
majority of Prussian High Schools are still 
"Gymnasien," with a course of study mainly 
classical and humanistic, though wider and more 
liberal than that of most of our classical schools, 
and second that the minority, the Real-Schulen, 
have, as the staple of their course, not so much 
natural science, though that is thoroughly taught, 
as modern languages, with history and geography. 
IsTow, no step could well be more fatal than to 
^* technologise " (if one may use a bad term for a 
bad thing) our Secondary Schools. Nothing could 
be more opposed to the German practice. The 
Science and Art Department has hitherto, through 
no fault of its own, constantly been placed in false 
positions. It was called upon to draw up schemes 
of drawing for Primary Schools, knowing nothing 
of Primary Schools, nor of the very peculiar educa- 
tional problem which is involved in the devising of 
schemes of drawing for little children between tho 
ages of five and twelve. Therefore, its schemes 
have been, in great degree, a failure, and the 
Department has very properly been relieved of so 
inappropriate a function. So again, by the force 
of circumstances, and in sheer absence of any other 
central authority, the same Department has had 



230 NEW AUTHORITIES 

Secondary Schools of a certain type under its 
control. It .was never officered nor equipped to 
deal with an " all round " education, and therefore 
its administration of Secondary Schools has been 
inevitably one-sided, and its examinations have 
fostered, not the "scientific spirit" and "the idea 
of systematic knowledge," but the very opposite of 
these qualities. We need not blame the Depart- 
ment for this, any more than we can reasonably 
blame an officer of infantry, who is put to 
administer the ordnance, if he does not successfully 
manage artillery. It is the system of organisation, 
in both cases, which is to blame. In both cases 
our clear duty is to extricate well-intentioned 
officials from impossible situations, and to leave 
them to the discharge of their proper functions. 
If the Science and Art Department, in its new 
guise as the Technological Section of the Office of 
Education is left in charge of the so-called Schools 
of Science, with a grant at its disposal which 
enables it to offer a bounty of £5 a head or more 
per annum on all pupils who adopt its curriculum ; 
while on the other hand the Secondary Section is 
inadequately manned and unprovided with funds, 
then the new organisation will be a cause of much 
evil to English education. 

Exactly the same danger threatens in another 
direction. The Government foreshadows, in the 
Queen's Speech, legislation by which local authori- 
ties will be established definitely for Secondary 



IN EDUCATION 231 

Ediicatioii. The promise is so worded as to suggest 
tliat it is intended to recognise the existing 
Technical Instruction Committees of County 
Councils as the local authorities. But these com- 
mittees were appointed, and their " organising 
secretaries " selected, for very di:Kerent functions. 
It is true that they have done much for Secondary 
Schools, and much that they have done has been 
highly beneficial. But it is notorious that in many 
cases they have adopted a very decided line of 
educational policy which has brought them into 
conflict, open or concealed, on the one hand with 
School Boards and on the other hand with the 
authorities of Secondary Schools. They have created 
institutions of their own, which they very reason- 
ably do their best to foster; but, in so doing they 
put themselves more or less in competition with 
other bodies, who also have institutions of their 
own. These bodies will very naturally be aggrieved 
if their competitors are, by law, set in authority 
over them. They have, on the whole, taken a 
" technological " line, a very useful line, no doubt, 
but a " specialist " line, wholly distinct from that 
which is required in dealing with the great bod}^ 
of Secondary Schools. The ''technological" view 
is supplementary to a secondary education; if 
prematurely introduced, it is inimical to a 
secondary education and incompatible with it. If 
Matthew Arnold could have foreseen that his re- 
peated cry, " Organise your Secondary Education" 



232 NEW AUTHORITIES 

miglit one day be answered by placing Secondary 
vScliools under the authority of tbe Science and Art 
Department, linked to Technical Instruction 
Committees, he would have stilled his voice, and 
have chosen the disease rather than the proffered 
remedy. 

The objection to such a solution of the problem 
does not lie merely in the fact that these 
Committees have, quite properly, a special bias of 
their own and that they stand committed to a 
particular policy, but also that the areas which 
they control are not educational areas, in respect, 
at least, of secondary education. Great towns like 
Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield drain, 
as it were, well-defined educational basins, which 
are not co-terminous with the areas of County 
Councils and County Boroughs, and which would 
be cut up in all directions by them. The Councils 
and Boroughs together make a far larger number 
of authorities than are necessary or desirable. 
In France the number of local authorities for 
secondary education is only 17, and it may well be 
doubted whether, for England, we require any 
more. If it is necessary to adopt the existing 
rating area as the unit, there is nothing, at any 
rate, to prevent the formation, by statute, of com- 
binations of such units for purposes of the control 
of secondary education. The County and Borough 
Councils might then elect representatives to serve 
on the combined Board, with the assistance of co- 



IN EDUCATION 233 

opted members to represent Universities and 
Higiier Schools. It should in this way be possible 
to secure Boards that would take a wide and 
impartial view of educational problems, Boards 
such as would command the respect and confidence 
of every style and stamp of educational institution 
throughout the country. 

The task of founding adequate educational 
authorities is a great one, and needs to be 
approached magnanimously, and with a due sense 
of the vital issues involved in it for the future 
well-being of the country. If it is done pettily 
and on lines of mere official convenience, the pre- 
sent Government will, by a sin of omission worse 
than any of commission, shrink from the worthy 
performance of that which is, perhaps, its highest 
duty. In their hour of deepest trouble, and of 
acutest financial stress, first Germany, and later 
France, turned to their system of education to 
discover and to remedy the secret of their weak- 
ness. To improve their education they expended 
both money, which they could ill spare, and energy 
which nations less enlightened might have devoted 
to merely military organisation. They had their 
reward in an amazing national recovery. Is 
England to appear incapable of a similar sacrifice 
and a similar foresight ? If not. Englishmen must, 
at whatever cost of effort, make sure that their new 
organisation, local and central, shall possess the 
character and the efficiency adequate to a most 
difficult task. 



Work and Play 



THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN 
WORK AND PLAY.^ 

In a valuable address recently delivered to this 
Society by Mr. Grabam Wallas,^ emphasis was 
laid on tbe importance of the distinction between 
work and play, and tbe criticism of a clever boy 
upon a Kindergarten was quoted— namely, tbat 
'' in tbis school they don't work when they work, 
nor play when they play." The point is vital, and 
I propose to discuss it with you, in the belief that 
one can be more useful by following a lead 
suggested by some previous lecturer than by going 
off on some wholly new line of one's own, to the 
destruction of all continuity of thinking. 

To understand the distinction between work and 
play is of consequence to all students of education, 
but, in particular, to those who regard Froebel as 
their master, because he is specially identified in 
English and American popular opinion with a 
belief in the educative value of play. Not that 
this belief originated with him. Eousseau, Locke, 
Montaigne, among other moderns ; Plato, most 
conspicuously among the ancients, had written at 
greater length than Proebel upon the subject of 

1 Summary of an address delivered to the Froebel Society on 
October 28th, 1901. 

2 Reported in the July number of Child Life, 1901. 



238 WORK AND PLAY 

play in education.^ But tlie '^ Anglo - Saxon " 
mind is impressed not so mucli with, written tlieory 
on education — of which, indeed, it remains for tlie 
most part ignorant — as with a working institution, 
which it can watch in operation. This institution 
is furnished by the Kindergarten ; and it is, there- 
fore, with the founder of the Kindergarten that we 
usually associate the idea that play educates. On 
this very ground, one of the latest critics of the 
Kindergarten, the admirable humourist " Mr. 
Dooley,^' in his " Philosophy," attacks the system 
for its alleged want of seriousness and grip on the 
actualities of life. What children mainly need to 
get, he says, is a " strangle-hold," that is an 
intense power of concentration on the business in 
hand, whether it is interesting or not. This they 
can never acquire by following their own caprices, 
and playing at work. And " Mr. Dooley " con- 
cludes with the aphorism that '^ it doesn't matter 
what you teach children, so long as they don't 
want to learn it." 

So far as criticisms of this kind are aimed at 
Froebel personally, they overlook the fact that the 
Kindergarten embodies only a portion of his 
educational theory, and was intended to provide 
for only a comparatively short section of the 

1 For an excellent summary of the opinions of great writers 
on this matter see " Das Spiel in der Geschichte der 
Padagogik," which forms the second section of G. A. Colozza's 
' ' Psychologie und Padagogik des Kinderspiels " (German 
translation and notes by Chr. Ufer). 



WORK AND PLAY 239 

period of growth. That whole period was divided 
by him into four stages : — (1) the nursling, up to 
the age of two and a half or three years; (2) the 
child, from three to seven years; (3) the boy or 
girl, from seven to sixteen or seventeen; (4) the 
youth or maiden, from seventeen to full age. Of 
these, the child stage, from the age of two or three 
to that of seven or eight, he calls the stage of play 
or speech, during which, as he phrases it, the child 
is chiefly occupied in '' making the inner outer " ; 
that is, in arriving at self-expression through 
movement and utterance. The next stage, that of 
the boy and girl, is specially the work stage, 
during which the growing mind " makes the outer 
inner " ; that is, masters its surroundings, learns to 
understand them, and, in time, to control them. 

Thus our distinction is one on which Froebel 
himself lays stress. There is nothing in his 
writings to suggest that he ever confused play and 
work. Yet manv people would agree with " Mr. 
Dooley " in saying that, if not Froebel, at least the 
Froebelians, have been guilty of this confusion. 
It seems well worth while, therefore, to grapple 
with the distinction, and to aim at arriving at clear 
ideas upon four main questions : — [a) In what 
points does play differ from work? (6) What light 
have recent biological investigations thrown upon 
the nature of play and its educative value? (c) 
What is the relation of play to other educative 
activities, and what is the specific function of play 



240 WORK AND PLAY 

in education ? (d) Wliat is tlie bearing of all tliis 
on school practice, and especially on tlie practice 
of Kindergartens ? 

It is evident that, within the limits of a brief 
address, the questions can only receive incomplete 
and provisional answers ; yet even answers of this 
kind may be of some service as a preparation for 
further study. 

(a) In what points does play differ from work? 

In trying for an answer to a question of defini- 
tion such as this, we are most likely to arrive at 
the simplest and broadest truths by following the 
old Greek method of examining commonly-received 
ideas embodied in stories, proverbs, and ordinary 
usages of words. Thus it is striking to find that 
the conception of tvork is often associated in early 
forms of religious belief with the idea of a fall, 
by which mankind passed from a state of innocence 
to that of a consciousness of good and evil, 
accompanied by a necessity, till then unknown, of 
labouring for food. The ancient poets conceived 
of the earliest Golden Age as one in which there 
was no work and no exchange of goods, when the 
earth was untilled and the sea was untravelled. 
Such an age, they conceived, should some day 
return, when time had passed through an entire 
cycle : — 

" Omnis f eret omnia tellus, 

Non rastros patietur humus, non vinea falcem, 

Robustis quoque iam tauris iuga solvet arator." 



WORK AND PLAY 241 

Tlius our liuman life was conceived of as lying 
between a Paradise Lost of innocence and a 
Paradise Regained of ultimate victory and restora- 
tion. This intermediate state is one of labour and 
sorrow in accordance witb the curse — " In the 
sweat of tby face slialt tliou eat bread" — 
denounced against the first man who ate of tbe 
tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Heaven, 
on tbe otber band, was conceived of as a state of 
existence in wbicb endeavour was to be replaced 
by fruition and faitb by love — a state of occupa- 
tion, no doubt, but of spontaneous and entirely 
happy occupation, where live the souls in bliss : — 

" In solemn troops and sweet societies 
That sing, and singing in their glory move." 

Whatever other meaning we may attach to these 
conceptions, it is clear that they symbolize the 
spiritual truth that uneasiness and effort are signs 
of imperfect adjustment; while enjoyable activity 
is an anticipation of that harmonized service which 
is perfect freedom; and, further, that in activity 
of either an extremely simple or of an extremely 
developed type the distinction between work and 
play does not arise, or arises only to be absorbed 
in a self-prompted energy which contains both. 
This is evidently true of infants, who are intensely 
and seriously busy in a number of ways, which we 
cannot classify under either the head of work or 



242 WORK AND PLAY 

tlie lieacl of play. It is true also of certain forms 
of adult activity — e.g., of a mother's laborious 
tending of her children, of a painter's pre- 
occupation with his studies, of the ceaseless practice 
of a devoted musician. Such forms of activity 
would be called work by some, because they imply 
responsible effort which it is the duty of the 
persons engaged in them to expend ; by others they 
would be called play, because they are in each case 
the thing of all others that these persons love to 
do. They are self -expressive ; they are, in the 
fullest sense of the words, free and spontaneous. 
The truth seems to be that such higher activities 
are both work and play in one. In the same way 
a teacher who is truly fond of children and of the 
subjects which she teaches never finds her work 
Tnere work. It is, at least, partly self -expressive ; 
duty and spontaneity are harmonized in it, and for 
intervals, at any rate, the teacher is in the Paradise 
Regained where the distinction is lost. It is only 
when, owing to some maladjustment or other, the 
activity becomes sheer strain and drudgery, that 
she falls to earth again. It is, however, only in 
the higher arts that such a fusion of work and 
play becomes possible. In many forms of activity 
there is so slight an amount of spontaneity and 
self-expression, that nothing but contract and 
obligation can avail to keep people steadily 
employed upon them. The clerk who enters 
figures all day long in books cannot, unless he is a 



WORK AND PLAY 243 

Tim Linkinwater, liave any doubt in his mind as 
to whetlier lie is really working or playing ; so 
must it be with a stoker in a stoke-bole, witb a 
factory-band wbo attends, year in and year out, to 
a particular corner of a buge piece of machinery, 
witb a sbop-girl, or a type-writer, or a bricklayer. 
And tbat is wby leisure and play are of sucb 
importance to tbese persons, and ougbt to be so 
largely considered in tbeir education. 

Even so, bowever, it is not easy to come at 
tbe essential difference between work and play. 
Herbert Spencer would make it consist in tbis : 
tbat work bas to do witb wbat directly affects tbe 
increase of means to live, tbe life-preserving 
activities; wbile play is concerned witb matters 
less vital. Tbis is exactly parallel to tbe 
distinction in economics between productive and 
unproductive expenditure. Neitber distinction, 
bowever, will stand investigation. Tbe amount of 
buman energy or of buman wealtb expended upon 
simply 'preserving life is relatively small; tbe 
greater quantity of botb goes to improving life in 
some way or otber, and, wbetber tbe improvement 
takes tbe form of a tunnel tbrougb tbe Alps, or of 
a water-colour painting, or of a sbapely bonnet, or 
of tbe perfect singing of a song, men will be 
willing to give something for it, if only, in tbeir 
opinion^ it makes life better wortb having. The 
money or the energy expended on the making of a 
cathedral is just as productive as that spent upon 



244 WORK AND PLAY 

ploiigliing a cornfield or making an arm-cliair, 
since it satisfies a liunian need. It seems vain to 
look for the difference between work and play liere, 
unless we are going to take as simple a view of tlie 
world as a certain tobacconist whom I once over- 
heard speaking to a cornet-player. The poor 
minstrel bad been laboriously playing bis instru- 
ment for twenty minutes in tbe rain outside tbe 
tobacconist's cosy shop; but, when be asked for 
money, " No, I've nothing for you," said the shop- 
man ; " We 'ave to work for what ive gets." 

Still less will it do to say that work is that part 
of our activity for which we are paid — since this 
would exclude all that vast quantity of gratuitous 
labour, which every one would call work, such as 
that of Sunday-school teachers, or members of 
Parliament, or governors of hospitals, or officers 
of Volunteers. 

We might spend much more time in examining 
other proposed grounds of distinction, such as that 
play is ''free" and ''pleasurable," while work is 
"constrained" and "not directly motived by 
pleasure " ; but our limits compel us instead to 
state a provisional definition dogmatically, and 
only to indicate roughly the reasons for its adoption 
and for the rejections of others. 

Work is an expenditure of energy in pursuit of 
a required end, an object outside itself. This 
object may either be set by superior force of others, 
as in human slaA^ery or in the servitude of domestic 



WORK AND PLAY 245 

animals; or it may be arranged by contract and 
bargain, as in tlie different forms of paid labour; 
or it may be imposed by tbe worker's own sense of 
duty or obligation, as in religions or pbilantbropic 
work ; or it may be fixed by tlie needs or desires of 
tbe worker, as in the case of a peasant proprietor 
who tills bis own soil for bis own sustenance, or 
of a pianist wbo repeats tlie same musical pbrase 
a thousand times, not because lie specially enjoys 
it, but to improve bis mastery of bis instrument. 

Play^ is an expenditure of energy witb no 
further intentional end than the action itself, like 
the gambols of a kitten or the running and jumping 
of boys let loose from school. Such an expenditure 
may be caused by an overflow of accumulated 
force, or by such an instinctive desire for exercise 
as appears to be a physiological correlative of 
growth, or by imitation, or by suggestion, or by 
other motives. But its characteristic mark is that 
it is performed for its own sake, and not for an 
ulterior object : thus spontaneity and a sense of 
pleasure (which may also accompany work) necess- 
arily accompany play. But it is important to 
notice that pleasure is not the object of play. A 
boy runs because he wants to ru7i, not because he 
wants to be pleased. The pleasure follows or 

1 The distinction here adopted is, of course, Greek. Play 
is an avToreAr)? irpa^L?, and so far resembles the highest 
forms of moral and intellectual activity : it is desirable for its 
own sake. 



246 WORK AND PLAY 

accompanies, does not precede the act. On these 
grounds the definition of play quoted from Rayneri 
by Chr. XJfer on page 6 of his translation of 
Colozza's work appears defective : "Alles dessen, 
dem sich der Mensch freiwillig zum Yergnugen 
hingiebt." 

Even with this distinction before us, we shall 
often find it hard to classify activities. Thus 
football is a form of play or sport; but when it is 
compulsory, or is played professionally, it may 
become work, and sometimes a sordid form of 
work. Even the element of competition tends to 
make play less playful, in so far as it is allowed to 
make the winning of the game more of an object 
than the splaying of the game. The feeling of 
many people that '' leagues " and '' cups " and 
" records " and " averages " tend to injure the 
character of sport is based on solid ground. 
Similarly with the element of chance or hazard, 
an element universally found in some kinds of 
play — as soon as palpable profit turns upon the fall 
of the cards or the cast of the die, an ingredient 
that speedily proves fatal to true " play " has been 
introduced, an external object which may absorb 
the whole interest of the so-called " player." So 
also with the desire for sympathy or applause, a 
feeling that accompanies most forms of play. This 
quickly degenerates into '' showing off " and 
'' playing to the gallery," when the external object 
dominates the player's mind. 



WORK AND PLAY 247 

But, besides this objective distinction, whicli 
may be expressed by saying that play is a self- 
contained activity, while work is undertaken with 
a view to some further end, it is also the case that 
there is a subjective or psychological difference 
between the moods of men and animals when at 
work and at play. The sense of tension and 
responsibility which enters into the working frame 
of mind is replaced in play by a feeling of light- 
heartedness and relaxation. The general truth of 
this is, indeed, modified by the elements of 
competition and the desire to excel, combined with 
the great complexity which distinguishes some 
modern forms of play. Thus an English public- 
school boy plays cricket with an intense solemnity 
and absorption which he does not always bring to 
bear upon what he calls his " work." And some 
people would even deny the very name of " play " 
to such a game as chess, on the ground that the 
characteristic mood of its " players " is deep 
concentration, marked by extreme physical 
immobility. Still, speaking broadly, we may 
allow that a mental state of freedom and enjoy- 
ment is characteristic of play, and one of fixity 
and effort is characteristic of work. In their 
extremes, where one of the two states becomes 
generally dominant in a character, there arises, 
on one side, an habitual irresponsibility and 
" devil-may-careness " ; and, on the other, a 
settled anxiety and sternness. These two 



248 WORK AND PLAY 

temperaments make a rich contrast, such as we 
find in history in the types of Cavalier and 
Puritan; or in literature, as in Shakespeare's 
comparison of Cassius and Antony, placed in the 
mouth of Julius Csesar : — 

" Let me have men about me that are fat, 
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights. 
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; 
He thinks too much : such men are dangerous. 

He reads much. 
He is a great observer, and he looks 
Quite through the deeds of men : he loves no plays^ 
As thou dost, Antony ; he hears no music ; 
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort 
As if he mock'd himself and scorn'd his spirit 
That could be moved to smile at anything." 

(b) We must now turn to our second question. 
What light have recent biological investigations 
thrown upon the nature of play and its educative 
value? Eor a full answer to this question we 
must go to the two great works of Karl Grroos, 
" The Grames of Animals," and " The Granies of 
Men," which were published at Jena in 1896 and 
1899 respectively, and which have both been 
translated into English. An excellent summary 
of the theories of Groos will be found in Chr. 
Ufer's introduction to his translation of the 

1 Games. 



WORK AND PLAY 249 

adiiiira,ble book of Colozza's, whicli has been 
several times referred to — " Psycbologie rind 
Padagogik des Kinderspiels " (priblislied by Oskar 
Bonde, at Altenbnrg, 1900). 

Here I can only put one or two main points very 
briefly. Among animals low down on tbe scale of 
life, e.g., tlie reptiles, individuals come into tlie 
world in such, a condition that tbey are fairly well 
able to take care of themselves. Among these we 
find few or no traces of play. On the other hand, 
among animals of more complicated structure the 
young are born in a helpless state, and take some 
little time before they can " fend for themselves." 
During their period of growth we find various 
forms of " play," bodily movements which are just 
of the kind best fitted to strengthen the limbs, 
quicken the senses, and prepare the whole 
organism for its later activities. Thus, in a beast 
of prey, like the cat or the weasel, the games of the 
young ones take the form sometimes of a hunt, 
sometimes of a sham fight. On the other hand, 
in animals whose future survival will depend upon 
their speed, such as deer, rabbits, or wild sheep, 
the games often assume the form of running, 
leaping, dodging, and wheeling. Play is thus the 
active aspect of growth, which gives an animal the 
fuller and fuller use of its powers; it is the 
practice, exercise, and experimentation which 
precede the regular employment of the limbs and 
senses. The German of Karl Groos puts this main 



250 WORK AND PLAY 

point very neatly; plfiy is the Vorvhung and tlie 
Einuhung whicli must go before Ausuhung. Tlins 
play appears as tlie functioning of hereditary, 
innate instincts, whicli can only come to perfection 
through this preliminary use. In the case of the 
highest animals, and, above all, of Man, imitation 
becomes an important element in play, and so also 
do its gregarious or social aspects. 

It will be realised at once that in these views of 
Karl Grroos, confirmed as they are by a mass of 
careful observations, we have a scientific basis for 
a belief in the educative force of play, such as 
Froebel could only dimly and imperfectly 
anticipate; since, as Mr. Graham Wallas showed 
you, his conception of evolution was that of his 
own age, and was necessarily defective in that it 
did not reckon with the influence of environment 
through natural selection. 

It is an obvious corollary of this view that, in 
the different forms of play adopted by children in 
their various stages of growth, the general 
progress of the whole race is recapitulated, or, as 
an American writer (L. Grulick, in the October, 
1898, number of the Po'pidar Science Monthly, 
quoted by Chr. Ufer) expresses it, '' Play is the 
ontogenetic rehearsal of the phylogenetic series." 
This is just an application of the Herbartian 
" culture epochs " theory to the sphere of play. 

A further, though very different confirmation 
by recent scientific investigation of Froebel's 



WORK AND PLAY 251 

belief in the importance of play is to be found in 
tlie proofs fiimished by experimental psycbology 
that pleasurable activity stimulates and beigbtens 
tbe vitality of cbilclren. This was current opinion 
long ago; but it is now scientific fact, measured 
and recorded. 

(c) We must now burry on to our third 
question : What is tbe relation of play to other 
forms of educative activity, and what is its specific 
function in education? As we have seen, the 
answer to this question, as regards infants, is plain 
enough. It may be said of them, as of young 
animals, that play is their education and education 
is their play. The use of their senses and limbs 
in tasting, seeing, hearing, and handling is a form 
of experimentation of which the wise educator, 
inspired by Froebel and guided by science, will 
take the fullest advantage. Up to the age of four 
or five, indeed, it is, perhaps, truer to say (as 
suggested at the beginning of this address) that 
the distinction between work and play does not 
yet arise, but that the movements and utterances 
of the child, u.nder the watchful care of mother or 
teacher, are play and work in one. 

Gradually, however, the distinction becomes 
valuable and even indispensable. For instance, 
the little child learns to dress and wash itself. At 
first this is play; but, as the child's strength and 
skill increase, it must also be work. Even when it 
no longer amuses the child, as a new sensation, to 



252 WORK AND PLAY 

brush its own liair, yet it must continue to do so 
as work; that is, for the sake of an ulterior object — 
its own neatness and the approval of others. So 
with other activities ; practised first of all as play, 
for their ow^n sake, with the help of impulse and 
curiosity, they must be kept up as work for the 
sake of further ends, even when the caprice of the 
moment is against their performance. Cleanliness, 
for example, may be an instinct with some 
children; but with most it is only a habit, which, 
in its earliest stages, must have a strong element 
of work in its composition. xlt the same time, 
common sense and the desire for economy of effort 
will combine with educational philosophy in 
recommending that the transition from impulsive, 
instinctive action to regulated, intentional action 
should be made as gently as possible, and should 
be restricted at first to a number of simple and 
easily intelligible acts, where even an infant can 
grasp the purpose for which they are to be done. 
Thus, slowly and distinctly, will the child come to 
the knowledge of good and evil, the " everlasting 
yea " and the '' everlasting nay," the thing that 
must on no account be left undone, and the thing 
that must on no account be done. Thus, little by 
little, grows the power of inhibition, and with it 
the power of attention, the negative and positive 
poles of the will. Thus is founded the strong 
character, at once energetic and loyal, full of 
initiative, yet self-controlled — the character that 



WORK AND PLAY 253 

may readily pass tlirougli tlie gates of effort and' 
obedience into tlie Paradise Eegained of healthy 
and absorbed activity. 

It is of great importance, therefore, to bear in 
mind that, when we speak of the supreme value of 
play at the Kindergarten stage, ive are not thinking 
of flay in antithesis to loorh, hut rather of ylay as 
the most convenient name for the total sum of self- 
activity in the child. This self -activity resembles 
play, in that it is pursued for its own sake and as 
the expression of inner impulse; but it resembles 
work in so far as it is quite earnestly carried on, 
and is the most strenuous form of action of which 
the child is, at that stage, capable. 

When once, the antithesis has arisen, and the 
child's ej^es are opened to know good and evil, then 
the child must be accustomed from time to time, 
in gradually lengthened periods, to attack a task 
with entire attention, and not to take its mind off 
until that task has been completed. Hence comes 
the mental grip, the " strangle-hold," which our 
friend " Mr. Dooley " justly looks for as one result 
of a sound training. Yet this paradox, that " it 
doesn't matter what you teach children, so long as 
they don't want to learn it," is just as certainly a 
fatal extreme as that excessive indulgence to 
caprice which it is intended to correct. And from 
both of these extremes a sound study of Froebel 
ought to preserve us. Work need never be 
irrational servitude, and the highest forms of work 



254 WORK AND PLAY 

admit of tke greatest amount of self-expression, 
and therefore of true freedom, relieved from '' the 
weight of chance desires." Thanks, in great 
measure, to Froebel, the whole world is coming to 
see that the work of the little child must be most 
delicately adapted to its stage of growth, and must 
give full scope to its budding instincts, its love of 
muscular movement, of variety, of constructive- 
ness, of living animals and plants, of pictures, and 
of cheerful sights and sounds. There is no reason 
why this should impair the seriousness and the 
mental concentration which work ought always to 
imply. On the contrary, the '' strangle-hold " is 
far easier to get upon some subject which, to begin 
with, appeals to child -nature. So frail and 
wavering is the little child's power of continuous 
attention that we need not be afraid that we can 
ever make work " too interesting," if it be genuine 
work, i.e., energy devoted to a definite object. 

On the other hand, there seems no doubt that in 
m.ost of our schools for children from seven to 
fourteen the course of study is still far too abstract 
and ill-adapted to growing minds. The sixth 
volume of Mr. Sadler's '' Special Reports on 
Educational Subjects " shows that in many of our 
chief preparatory schools for boys the merest 
fragments of time are on the average devoted to 
such subjects as English language and literature, 
drawing, geography, history, natural science, 
manual work, and the other topics which really 



WORK AND PLAY 255 

answer to tlie instincts and needs of boys of tliat 
age. Most of their energy is given to learning 
three foreign languages from a grammatical point 
of view. This is an adoption of " Mr. Dooley's " 
paradox with a vengeance, and its results may be 
seen in the lack of intellectual interest and 
keenness in a large proportion of the boys who 
have had the *' best education that money can 
buy." 

Truly there is still a vast deal of work to be done 
by a Froebel Society which works for the spirit 
and substance, not for the letter and form, of 
Eroebel's teaching. The elements of self-activity 
and s elf -"pos session have yet to receive their proper 
scope in many of our schools for older children. 

These elements — which may, if folks please, be 
called the play-elements in work — distinguish true 
work from meaningless and stupefying drudgery. 
It is all the more essential that they should enter 
into the work of our schools, because they have, to 
a large extent, ceased to enter into the play. As 
Mr. Eooper pointed out long ago in his charming 
book on " School and Home," the prevalence of 
some half-a-dozen great games in English schools, 
to the destruction of all other pastimes, hobbies, 
and amusements, has had some deplorable results. 
Cricket and football played upon pitches prepared 
by " groundmen " are, after all, stereotyped and 
monotonous, if contrasted with the total range of 
young activities which they have killed out. 



256 WORK AND PLAY 

Grand games as' they are, they give scope to a 
comparatively few fine qualities, such as courage, 
decision, and the like; and altogether starve a 
number of others scarcely less important, such as 
constructiveness, curiosity, ingenuity, the power 
of continuous thinking, the power of working to a 
plan. Now that these games are not merely 
obligatory on all, but that the day is so arranged 
that there is very little time or spare energy for 
anything but compulsory work and compulsory 
games, certain forms of the play-spirit have 
deserted these schools altogether, and there is little 
or no scope in them for variety of occupation, for 
initiative, for a thoughtful boy's " hobby." It 
may be seriously questioned whether the minute 
regulation of a boy's or girl's time-table has not 
been pushed too far. The experience of the 
present war has led people to ask whether the 
devotion of all leisure to slightly different types of 
games is a good preparation for the difficulties of 
life, which need versatility, trained attention, and 
the power of thinking out, and working out, a 
plan. If Waterloo was won on our playing-fields, 
may it not be in a certain sense true that Colenso 
was lost there ? 

These are grave matters, not to be settled 
lightly. But I feel no doubt that those schools 
for boys and girls are right which vary the 
eternal pursuit of games of ball with other 
occupations, such as the learning of some handi- 



WORK AND PLAY 257 

craft, the playing of a musical instrumerxt, simple 
forms of farm and dairy work, surveying, map- 
making, cookery, and the like. Sucli forms of 
play bring into use many dexterities, which, if not 
exercised in childhood, are apt to perish by 
atrophy. They lay the foundation of hobbies and 
tastes which may remain a source of ever-fresh 
delight, even " forty years on," when football has 
long ceased to be a possibility. And, at the 
present moment, they give a boy something 
pleasant to do, even when he cannot find twenty- 
one other boys to kick a ball with him.^ 

(d) Our fourth question. How does all this bear 
upon school practice, and particularly on the 
practice of Kindergartens? can only be touched 
upon. To begin with, we have already seen that 
there is good reason for thinking that a too 
mechanical conception of work still prevails in 
many of our schools, and that much can be done 
to bring the curriculum into closer touch with the 
instincts and interests of child-nature. A great 
deal is being attempted already. The neuere 
Richtung, or reform method of teaching modern 
languages, is a system conceived entirely in the 
spirit of Eroedel. So also is the movement 
for more " practical methods " in teaching 
mathematics, for which Professor Perry is doing 

1 An interesting account of Bedales School, near Petersfield, 
which is one of the Schools where other forms of play in 
addition to "games" are encouraged, will be found in M. 
Edmond Demolins' book, " La Nouvelle Education." 



258 WORK AND PLAY 

so mucli. No doubt tliese methods have tlieir 
cliaracteristic dangers — tlie '' play " element may 
easily become too strong, as it does sometimes in 
so-called " benristic " science methods. But, in 
contrast with what they replace — the meaningless 
memorising of misunderstood formnlse — they are 
an immense improvement, and further experience 
will show ns how to avoid their dangers. 

As for Kindergai-tens, I would venture to ask 
whether, in some of them, the development of the 
spirit of " work " is not artificially delayed later 
than is advisable, and whether the habit of con- 
tinuous, absorbed attention gets enough practice 
among the older children? I would also ask 
whether the type of " play " often used in action- 
plays is really '' play " at all, or something 
invented by "grown-ups" to look like play? 
Certainly it does not look like Karl Groos's 
" biological play " ; it is not an anticipation by the 
young organism of the sort of situations and 
movements which will afterwards occur in '^ real 
life." This '' biological play " is found among 
children when they are left to themselves, and 
when they act in " make-believe " armies and 
wedding processions, and Church services, and 
shopping, and house-building, and the like. But 
I never saw a child, left to itself, act the part of a 
daisy, or a tree with the leaves rustling, or any of 
the other vegetable or inanimate objects which it 
is supposed to represent in many " action-plays." 



WORK AND PLAY 259 

These are not instinctive, self -expressive games; 
ihej are not play, they are not work. The words 
in which they are written are often inexcusably 
feeble and drivelling, and the music with which 
they are accompanied is sometimes not even tenth- 
rate. A good many of them want " reforming 
altogether." 

This is a matter of vital importance to us as a 
nation. Who can watch a number of young men 
and women of the working classes let loose for a 
holiday without feeling that their education — in 
spite of all our boasted " games " — has not taught 
them to play.^ They have, in too many cases, no 
resources, no pastimes, no hobbies, no pleasant 
and graceful ways of " fleeting time carelessly, as 
they did in the golden days." Their singing is a 
discordant yell, their movements are clumsy and 
violent. They seem wholly without that training 
for a free and worthy enjoyment of leisure which 
Plato considered one of the chief aims of educa- 
tion. Just at the present time every one cries out 
for " technical and commercial instruction " that 
our people may learn to work. We have still to 
discover that, even from the point of view of vital 
efhciency, it is no less indispensable that they 
should also be trained in desirable forms of play. 

^Postscript. — The above article was in type 
before Mr. Rudyard Kipling's famous poem 

* Added when the above summary was printed as an article 
in Child Life. 



260 WORK AND PLAY 

appeared in the Times of January 4. It is 
tinfortnnate tliat lie should have put his views of 
the weak side of our national games in so personal 
and unrestrained a form. His two main points — 
namely, that cricket and footbal are not in them- 
selves an adequate training for the paramount 
duty of our national defence, and that excessive 
devotion to them (especially among those who only 
" look on ") dissipates the power of continuous, 
constructive, mental application — appear to me to 
be true, and to require, at the present moment, 
energetic expression. 



Bacon 



SUMMARY OF A LECTURE ON 

BACON'S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. 

Delivered at the Franco-English Gnild, April 18, 1901. 

1. Introduction. The Guild, an institutioii witli 
whicli Bacon would tiave sympatliized. His scheme 
for international communication of ideas. The 
" Merchant of Light " in the '' New Atlantis." He 
himself spent two years in France. 

2. Writings in which Bacon's philosophy of life 
is to be studied : Essays, Letters, " New Atlantis," 
Apophthegms, " Meditationes Sacrae," " De 
sapientia veterum." 

3. Criticisms and commentaries for consultation : 
[a) French : 

(i) Bacon, sa vie etc. C. de Eemusat. 
(ii) La Philosophic de F. Bacon par Charles 

Adam. 
(iii) Study of Bacon's Philosophy by 
Barthelemy St. Hilaire. 

(6) English: 

(i) Collected "Works, ed. Spedding and 

Ellis, 
(ii) Bacon, by Dr. E. A. Abbott. 



264 BACON 

(iii) Macaulay's Essay on Bacon, 
(iv) E. W. Cliurcli in '' English Men of 
Letters." 

4. Relation of Bacon's life to his opinion on 
Human Conduct. B. not a mere ''savant" but also 
a man of tlie world and a statesman, in an epoch 
of intense activity. Born 1561, died 1626. His 
life may be divided into three periods : — 

(a) 1561 — 1603. Forty-two years of compara- 
tive obscurity during the lifetime of Queen 
Elizabeth. At Cambridge 1573—1575. In 
France 1576—1579. Enters Parliament 1584. 
Intimacy with Essex 1591 — 1600. 

(6) 1603—1621. Eighteen years of busy public 
life. Eise and fall. Married 1606. Solicitor 
General 1607. Attorney General 1613. 
Attaches himself to the rising favourite 
George Yilliers, afterwards Duke of Bucking- 
ham 1615. Became Lord Chancellor 1618. 
Made a Peer 1618. His fall on the charge 
of having received bribes 1621. 

(c) 1621 — 1626. Five years in Disgrace. 
Literary and Scientific Activity. 

5. With these three periods correspond the three 
Editions of the Essays. 

(a) 1597, containing ten only. 

(b) 1612, containing thirty-eight. 



BACON 265 

(c) 1625, containing fifty-eiglit. 

Otlier chief literary and scientific works. 

Advancement of Learning 1605, Novum 

Organum 1620, History of Henry YII. 1622. 

De Augmentis and New Atlantis 1623. 

6. In the essays may be traced the influence of 

certain great personalities with whom Bacon was 

brought into close contact, especially. 

(a) His parents, Sir Nicholas Bacon, a trusty 
statesman and a man of business, and Anne 
Cooke, an accomplished and learned woman, 
of strong Puritan opinions and energetic 
character. 
(6) Queen Elizabeth, whom he admired and 
feared, and who seems to have disliked him ; 
King James I. whose extreme views of the 
royal prerogative he supported. 

(c) His near relations, the Cecils, crafty and 
practical politicians. 

(d) Two royal favourites Essex, his friend and 
champion, a courtier, warrior and scholar of 
brillant and noble qualities, to whom Bacon 
was disloyal; Buckingham, dashing, selfish, 
shallow, to whose evil influence Bacon gave 
support. 

(c) Sir Edward Coke, his rival in law and in 
courtship, who overwhelmed Bacon by 
superior audacity, physical vigour, and 
practical powers. 



266 BACON 

7. From his letters and his life, we may gather 
that he was precociously solemn ("my little Lord 
Keeper" as Queen Elizabeth called him as a boy) ; 
intensely fond of reading; physically delicate; 
deficient in strength of character, self-respect and 
courage ; lacking in passion as a lover and a friend ; 
keenly sensitive and observant ; ambitious and fond 
of display; inclined to intrigue and not over 
scrupulous. Starting with lofty ideals, derived 
from his mother's influence and from his own high 
imagination and splendid intellectual powers, he 
lacked the virility and will to carry out these ideals 
in action. Hence the double vein of feeling in the 
Essays ; hence a certain sombre tone of discourage- 
ment, lit up, from time to time, by a glow of the 
noblest thoughts. Plunged into the life of a court, 
such as that which Shakespeare's "Hamlet" 
describes, he resembles Polonius in the excellence 
of his maxims, in the coldness of his heart, and in 
the failure of his intrigues. 

8. His Essays should be re-arranged for purposes 
of study, under certain great heads such as 
Religion, Politics, Society, etc., etc. They repre- 
sent " axiomata media," rough generalisations from 
experience, observations collected with a view to 
an Inductive and Experimental Philosophy of 
Human Conduct. They are not meant to be 
systematic or methodical. In style they are 
Hebraic, full of allegory and metaphor, condensed, 
sombre, profound, impersonal. 



BACON 267 

9. Bacon, a man of tlie Renaissance, a European 
as well as an Englisliman. Nationalities and 
national characteristics less differentiated tlien, 
than now. Comparison with Montaigne. 

(a) Points of Similarity. Contemporaries 
(Bacon was 31 when Montaigne died), both 
studied law, both disliked it and desired its 
reform and simplification, both went to 
court ; both showed incapacity for action ; 
both despised subtle and argumentative 
erudition and advocated education of the 
body, the character and the judgment, rather 
than of the memory; both delighted in 
anecdote and quotation, and in a style full 
of images and "picture phrases" ; both were 
tolerant and large minded. 

(b) Points of difference. Montaigne is talkative, 
intimate, frank, personal; he admits his 
own weakness and disarms us by his 
candour, his friendship for La Boetie is full 
of poetry and passion. Bacon is more 
sublime and profound, more objective, more 
concise; a great thinker, but less sincere 
and less lovable. 



INDEX TO LETTERS. 



Alnmouth^ viii. 
Amours de Voyage, ii. 

Child-Study, xxv. 
Clifton, V. 
Coniston, v. 

Consolation, Letter of, xiii. 
Correlation, xviii. 
Cromer, vii. 

Dickens, xix. 
Dornoch, vi. 

Ethics for Teachers, xii. 
Examination Papers, xxii. 

Hastings, i. 

Herbart, xvi., xxiv. 

History and Citizenship, xvii. 



Holiday Letters, i., ii., v., vi., 

vii., viii., xxi., xxv. 
Holyhead, xxv. 
Humanity in Education, xii. 

Literature in Education, xiv. 
Logic Text-books, xv. 

Nettleship, R. L., iii., iv. 
Norway, ii. 

Practical Teacher^ xviii. 

Secondary School Ideals, x. 
Swiss Primary Schools, xi. 
Swiss Teachers, xv. 

Training of Teachers, xx. 

Wedding, A Friend's, ix. 




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